Wake me up when September ends

Last Friday I realized that there was going to be a joint family birthday celebration on the weekend for Jake and my dad, and, like always, I needed to buy a gift for my dad.  For some reason I always, always leave his birthday gift for the last minute, and then make a panicked rush to the mall where I wonder what to get a sixtyish man who has everything, and end up buying the same splash aftershave that I always buy.  This is exactly what I did last Friday, and when I got home I opened a drawer to find the golf shirt I bought for him a month before in an effort to bypass my usual end-of-September panicked mall rush.  I guess I can cross him off my Christmas list, that is, if I remember.

While I was at the mall I decided, in addition to purchasing evidently redundant birthday gifts, I needed to look for a pair of jeans.  My stay-at-home mom uniform consists of jeans, and a couple of my standbys are getting quite threadbare.  So I popped into a jean store, spotted a super-perky eighteen year old salesgirl, and said, like a hip Betty White, “I need some jeans that will make my butt look really good!”  She nodded earnestly and said seriously “I totally understand.  I have a really bad butt too.”  Hm.  That wasn’t exactly the response I expected.  I was still a little congested, so I stood there for a moment wondering if perhaps I had misheard her – after all, who would actually say that – but I couldn’t, and still can’t, figure out what might had been said instead. 

As an aside, any of my girlfriends to whom I have related this story have reacted with appropriate horror, but my husband seems to have taken a peculiar blame-the-victim stance, saying that I shouldn’t have asked for something to improve the look of my butt as that implies that I do, indeed, have a bad butt.  So it’s really my fault, in his view, and the salesgirl was just trying to help.  I do not think I agree with this assessment.

Anyway, maybe my bad-butt bonding with the salesgirl was actually beneficial, because she brought me the most comfortable and flattering jeans that I have ever worn.  I’m wearing them right now as a matter of fact.  However, before she brought me my new favourite jeans, she brought me a pair of skinny jeans, just for “fun”.  Against my better judgement, I tried them on.  I had a small self-esteem crisis right there in the change room.  Not only were they terribly unflattering, but they were also an unwelcome and unnecessary reminder of the Flight of Time, since they strongly resembled jeans I wore over two decades ago.  Remember safety pinning the ankles of your jeans?  Or rolling them tightly?  Or – if you had a mother who knew her way around a sewing machine, as I did – having them sewn tightly along the calf and ankle?  Yeah.

Never again.  After this debacle, someone told me that the Gap sells skinny jeans that are, apparently, awesome, so I looked them up on their website.  That’s when I saw these.  Stirrup jeans!!  Stirrups!  I never thought I would see the day, I tell you.  Flight of Time indeed.

My Dog Is Fat

Yesterday on the “news” – Breakfast Television – I saw the following headline: Pediatricians say parents turn a blind eye to childhood obesity.  I know that it is a serious and sad issue, but I rarely think about childhood obesity, as I have the opposite problem; my kids are very, very skinny.  They are countable-ribs, toothpick-legs skinny.  They are sigh-of-relief-when-they-gain-a-pound skinny.  They are stomach-flues-give-me-incredible-stress-because-of-weight-loss skinny.

Remember those growth charts and percentiles we all fretted about or possibly are still fretting about, when the kids were babies?  For a type-A, competitive mother, it was all about achieving the maximum percentile on the growth chart.  That’s how you knew you were doing a good job of mothering.  You would think that the key to our children’s future success would be in becoming as gargantuan as possible, given the effort and thought we gave to the growth chart.  “Your son is in Harvard Business School?”  “Well, yes!  He is seven feet tall and four hundred pounds.  He was always in the 99^th percentile.”  Anyway, my children were always, always consistently in the 60-75^th percentile for height, and the 25^th for weight.  Beanpoles.

I feed them three wholesome meals and three wholesome snacks a day.  They drink whole milk with chocolate syrup and smoothies made with full-fat yogurt.  I butter their bread.  I bake all the time – muffins, cookies, loaves – so that they can have homemade, calorie-dense snacks.  They eat all kinds of fruits and vegetables.  I allow them ice cream and treats.  My doctor, my dear doctor who has been practicing medicine for over thirty years tells me that they are healthy and growing well, and their weight is fine, but I know that they are one stomach flu away from being seriously underweight and so I am happy and relieved when the scale goes up.

Yesterday I took the dog for his annual checkup and discovered, startlingly, that he has gained TEN POUNDS in the past year.  Ten pounds!  I felt sick to my stomach, thinking that my two year old dog is now overweight.  He is part Labrador, and so he would eat constantly if he was allowed to.  I walk him for thirty minutes every day, but frequently when I have been busy, instead of sitting down and playing with him or petting him, I have been giving him treats to show my affection.  In other words, my dog, my poor fat dog, is now on a diet because of me.  “It’s not enough to increase his exercise,” the vet said, “You need to really cut calories.”  Which is, strangely enough, exactly what the doctor in my maternity group practice said to chubby, post-partum me six years ago.  So I feel guilty and sad.  Weight issues, one way or the other, are overwhelming.

"We may be skinny, but we are happy!"

The beanpoles.

The fat dog.

Feed a Cold

One of the first things that happens to me when I am not feeling well is I lose my appetite.  The less I eat the worse I feel, and then the less I feel like eating, so it's a weird downward spiral.  This morning I woke up feeling worse than ever, and after a walk with Mark and the dog that seemed to be the death of me, I realized I was kind of hungry.  I wanted Kraft Dinner.  I haven't eaten Kraft Dinner in many years, and obviously we didn't have any in the house, but seriously, I would have performed any number of indecent acts for a bowl of KD.  Finally I gave up the ghost and realized that an acceptable substitute would be a grilled cheese sandwich, given that I had bread and cheese in the fridge, and after that I pretty much mowed my way through the kitchen.  I found things I didn't even really know we had - Hey!  Tortilla chips!  Wow!  Cookies and cream ice cream! - and after that nutritional burst I felt immediately well and strong.  I marvelled at this, thinking that maybe I had just invented the world's greatest cold remedy - eating - but then I remembered the old adage "Feed a cold" and felt startlingly unoriginal.

I kept saying to my husband, "I can't believe how great I feel, from eating!" over and over.  "Really." he said, then left to go golfing, but not before snapping this picture

I thought maybe I would have a nap, something I never do, and in the end it never happened.  Jake, who was also not feeling well, decided he was tired and wanted to lay on the couch with me, and then he proceeded to effusively hug me every couple of minutes.  You can't buy that kind of attention.  Unfortunately he also kept accidentally elbowing me in the face and pulling my hair, so it was less than relaxing.  Mark just kept up a steady stream of one-sided conversation, before going to draw me a couple dozen pictures to cheer me up - which they did, of course - but he kept bringing them and shoving them right in my face to show me.  I enjoyed about five minutes of silence before Mark annouced that he had brought up all the painting supplies but not to worry, he could prepare the palette all by himself.  Nothing gets a person off the couch faster than the thought of a six year old painting unsupervised.

The very unfortunate part of today was that it was unseasonably warm, possibly one of the best days of the year, and other than my strenuous two block walk, I spent it inside.  However, now that I have abandoned my diet of cinnamon tea, cereal, and Sudafed for a heartier one, I really am on the mend. 

Since I am stuck on the couch I will live vicariously through you all.  What are you doing on this lovely weekend?

Back to the germ factory.

Does anyone else have the typical back-to-school cold? School germs work fast. No one in our house has been sick for at least five months, but a couple weeks into September sees us down with a cold. Although it is a pretty minor cold – the boys have had it and recovered quickly – it’s still annoying. I came down with a headache on Tuesday morning, and I was treating it all naturally and homeopathically, with various salt-water remedies, until I woke up this morning and said, fuck it, I’m going for the big guns. A Sudafed with my third cup of coffee and I feel marginally better, and significantly more jittery.

I don’t like to complain about things like colds, because truly, if no one is barfing, I’m happy. But really, the thing I hate most about a head cold is the whole “me brain no work good”. Like I was completely puzzled as to why the sink wasn’t draining when I rinsed out the teapot, only to find the offending teabag plugging the drain. Or how I became internally belligerent today at the grocery store because I couldn’t find the raisins, which were located exactly where they always are.

But MY WORD, the children. The children are so irritating. My husband says it’s not them, it’s me, which is true I’m sure but “Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? MOM? Guess what? Mom? Guess what? Mom? Can I tell you something?” is getting to me. Are they honestly always like that and do I just not notice? Answer: probably. They seem to expect a response for every “Mom?” and even when I do respond, they continue to repeat it. “Mom? Mom?” It’s all I can do not to scream “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHAT? WHAT?” Generally by the time they finish their litany of “Mom?”’s, they have forgotten what they were saying in the first place. KILL ME.

The happy news is that the sun is out. After a summer which was, reportedly, one of the coldest on record, and ahead of what is supposed to be one of the coldest winters on record, the sun is actually shining and it is warm enough that I am not wrapped in the gigantic grey sweater my mother-in-law knitted for me ten years ago, as I have been for days. The kids have been happily playing at the school playground and I have been happily soaking up the sun, wearing three layers of sweaters. I am going to be well tomorrow, I just know it. It’s not just the Sudafed talking.

Too Much Stuff! Or, why you should consider a charity birthday party.

A little while ago, my best friend mentioned that her daughter had attended a “charity” birthday party, in which the birthday child had requested donations to a charity in lieu of gifts. This struck me as brilliant. I’ve always wanted to have a big birthday party with lots of guests, but I didn’t want to get the corresponding number of gifts, both from a think-of-the-earth-and-all-those-plastic-toys point of view and also a my-kid-already-has-too-much-stuff-the-spoiled-bastard point of view.

Then a very good friend of mine told me her daughters have birthday parties in which guests bring food bank donations in lieu of gifts and I was completely inspired. (Note: I am also completely inspired by her phenomenal cake-making skills, although my arrangement of miniature plastic animals on green frosting and calling it an African savannah is was somewhat less impressive than her cake that looked exactly like a bag of movie popcorn, or the one that looked like a swimming pool, or the perfect cake-replica of Elmo.)

Seriously, she MADE these. Kind of makes my efforts look a little, um, weak?

Anyway, for Jake’s birthday, we requested guests bring food bank donations, which they did most generously. The key to a successful charity birthday party is to get agreement from your child beforehand, unless you want a resentful little birthday kid. From a young age we have instilled in the boys the idea that they are very lucky, and that there are some children who are not so lucky, and some of those children do not even have enough to eat. Telling Jake that his party would help some of those hungry children was a real selling point for him. We also assured him that he would be receiving gifts – from us, his grandparents, aunts and uncles – just not from his friends. Then we made sure to give him a few things that he really wished for – a certain Bakugan, a Ben 10 Alien, the book The Great Pie Robbery, the latter of which sent my mother on a wild goose chase to a number of book stores. He didn’t miss the gifts at all, and was excited just to have cards that were thoughtfully chosen or made.

There are so many good reasons to have a charity birthday party. Obviously, the charity benefits, but so does the child. In our society, children often have so much that they really can’t appreciate all they have – my children included. From a more selfish point of view, it is MUCH easier on the parents. How many times have you trolled the toy store aisles, wondering what an appropriate gift would be, wondering which book/Barbie/Polly Pocket/superhero/ Star Wars figurine the birthday kid does not already have, only to find out later that the birthday kid already received that exact gift but you forgot to attach a gift receipt so they can’t exchange it? Or maybe that’s just me. Buying some extra groceries is just so much easier. No gift wrap, no waste – it’s perfect.

Look at all the donations! Thank you to Jake's friends for their wonderful generosity.

I have a bad case of the Fridays!

Which is to say I’m kind of tired. It has been a long and disjointed week, ending with the kids out of school today due to parent/teacher interviews. My husband was out of town for a couple of days, which always makes for a long, disjointed week. When he told me he was going out of town, my mental reactions were threefold: a) Nooooo...it’s Jake’s birthday, you can’t be away for Jake’s birthday, b) Nooooo...I’m going to miss yoga, and c) Ooh, I can watch When Harry Met Sally and repeat all the dialogue without someone complaining about this being “annoying”. Solo bedtime is not at all difficult these days, with the grave exception of lecturing Mark on rinsing out the giant handful of shampoo he uses for his half-inch long hair, but I still found myself tired out by the end of it.

Also tiring was my attempt at domestic goddess-hood. I just completed baking and frosting two dozen cupcakes for tomorrow’s party. Besides those, in the past five days I have made the following: banana muffins, zucchini loaf, sugar cookies, bread dough, and a birthday cake. My whole life is revolving around baked goods, plus my regular meal preparation. In addition, I have made three separate trips for groceries, including an anxiety attack-inducing trip to Costco. It’s all about food around here, apparently.

Then, there was today’s extremely misguided shopping trip at Wal-Mart. As I mentioned, tomorrow is Jake’s birthday party, and since September is a time of new friendships and classmates, I decided to invite his entire kindergarten class – which sounds more magnanimous than it is, given his small class size. However, not everyone RSVP’d, which is irritating. Still, I felt like that should not bother me – although I did list my email address in the scenario that someone, god forbid, didn’t want to actually speak to me on the phone. I just assumed the non-RSVPers were not attending, but according to Jake, some of them ARE. People! Passing messages through kindergarteners is not a reliable or acceptable method of RSVP. PICK UP THE PHONE. I don’t know their parents or phone numbers, so I can’t check. However, I realized that if those children are attending, then I needed to get a few more environmentally friendly paper bags to make goody bags out of. Hence the last-minute trip to Wal-Mart. At two o’clock in the afternoon on a day where there is no school.

The parking lot was insane. The crowds were insane. When I discovered that they were all out of little paper bags, I felt that the best possible scenario was for me to just lie down on the floor in the aisle and stare at the ceiling for a while. If it were not for the fact that the floor is likely swarming with germs and that I would probably cause some sort of violent shopping-cart rage and get seriously injured, I would have done just that. Instead, I herded my extremely irritable self and my extremely irritable children through the soul-destroying aisles and past the crabby and smelly shoppers to the checkout. In the lineup, I tried hard to breathe deeply and not be bothered by the guy behind me who kept, despite the fact that there was no place to move, inching his cart forward until it was actually touching me. Don’t be upset, I said to myself zen-ly, you’ll be out of here soon, and does it really matter if some mullet-wearing guy who reeks of garlic and cigarettes is invading your personal space? In the grand scheme of things, does it matter? Then I came home and stared blankly at the wall for a while.

Fortunately my neighbour is celebrating her birthday tonight and has invited me over for a margarita (or several). I could really use one, it would seem.

Hey, check out the guy who's FIVE.

Those were his first words to me this morning. I should teach him the old "What has two thumbs and is FIVE today? This guy!"



We baked cookies to take to his class yesterday. They turned out not too bad, considering I was frosting them and Jake was in charge of sprinkles.

I wrote about my labour stories last year, here here and here, so if you're interested in labour stories, click on the links. Or, I can sum it up for you: I was crazy and cried a lot (unlike every single other blog post I have ever written), I had the world's least engaged labour and delivery nurse, and my husband complained of being tired. During my labour. Uh huh.

Wow, you're huge! That's what I heard for approximately 5 months of my pregnancy.



Look at his squishy little face! Awww! He essentially didn't wake up for our entire 24 hour hospital stay, even while being bathed, spurring our nurse to tell me how lucky I was to have such a mellow baby, which ended up being the falsest sentence ever uttered.

Mark gave him a Ben 10 Ultimate Alien, after which Jake stated that this was the best birthday ever!

I baked - and decorated - this cake and I think it turned out pretty well, considering my lack of talent and all. I didn't even cry while decorating this, which is a first.

What has two thumbs and a brand new five year old? This girl!

Hardwood, birthday prep, smoking

Pictures! Hardwood! Don’t worry, they are G-rated.


My husband also painted that lovely burnt orange colour this weekend.

The remainder of the house has yet to be painted – and I’m anxious to get the kitchen painted, as its current yellow clashes weirdly with the orange – and baseboards have yet to be repainted and attached, but the home renovation is coming along nicely, with my sanity mainly intact. Of course, I’ve turned into Lady Macbeth, except with dust, but that was to be expected.

Other than dusting – and laundering my dusty panty drawer – I have been busy preparing for Jake’s birthday, which is two days from now. I feel like I should be nostalgically mooning around, remembering things like “Five years ago today I was waddling around like an obese penguin. Five years ago today I was bursting into tears about nothing. Five years ago today I consumed half a loaf of bread, toasted with Cheez Whiz.” For some reason I’m not doing that. I am, however, obsessing over goody bags to give his little friends. I have a problem with goody bags. For one thing, I don’t like all the typical goody bag crap that eventually ends up in the landfill, but I don’t want to NOT give goody bags. What I end up doing is filling them with one small toy – a bouncy ball – a sheet of stickers, and a whole bunch of mini chocolate bars. This gives me pause. I think it’s better to give something consumable, rather than something landfill-ish, but will the high sugar content render me unpopular with the parents? Warning: if you’re reading this and your child is coming to Jake’s party, you are going to have lots of chocolate to deal with.

In other news, I ran to the grocery today to pick up cake mix – don’t judge, I have a LOT of things to bake this week – and birthday candles, and at the checkout I asked the cashier if they sold lighters. “Lighters?” she asked “Like to light cigarettes?” No, I explained, to light birthday candles. She appeared not to hear me and then launched into this incredibly long and bitter monologue about not being able to sell cigarettes or smoking related paraphernalia in the grocery, because there is an anti-smoking conspiracy around and smokers – like her– were essentially pariahs in this society. I listened to this with a polite, nervous smile – fortunately there was no lineup behind me - and wondered where I COULD buy a lighter, or even a book of matches, but I didn’t want to ask because the cashier was getting really agitated by her own conversation. Finally I left with my one small bag and she called out after me, ominously, “We smokers pay a LOT of taxes.” On my way out a carry out guy tapped me on the shoulder to inform me that lighters were available at the gas station.

That's what she said!

So! The hardwood is in! The hardwood is in! Part one of our home renovation process is DONE, and thank god for that because a) it is extremely messy, dirty, and disruptive, and b) this past week I have turned into the World's Least Interesting Person. My entire brain was concentrated on the hardwood installation. The kids are back to school? Whatever, we're getting hardwood. I feel badly for any of the poor unsuspecting souls who had the grave misfortune of talking to me this week. The slightest greeting from their side resulted in the regaling of my hardwood tales. "Hi Nicole, how are you?" "We're getting hardwood installed." Cue long story about hardwood.

So, I apologize to everyone I talked to this week. Also I feel I must apologize for the plethora of really bad hardwood jokes that I felt must be made under the circumstances, of the "that's what she said" variety. But, wow. Those jokes practically tell themselves. After the installation, the (very cute) installer warned about scratches and dents, saying "Hardwood is a bit of a misnomer. It's not that hard. It's more like medium wood." And THAT, I felt, needed some kind of witty remark but to be honest, I was kind of high from all the glue fumes in the house and so any repartee would have made me sound like a delirious lunatic.

So now I am going to go spend some time putting the house back together - including throwing out some of the accumulated crap from the kids' bedrooms, sssh, don't tell them - and enjoying the feeling that I have a brand new house, in the convenient location of my old house. Pictures to follow once I have things back in order, although, alas, I do not have any pictures of the installation itself. I was tempted, on the suggestion of a friend, to photograph the cute installers under the guise of "recording the progress", but I felt too weird and cougar-ish to actually go through with it. Plus, I was feeling kind of strange since in moving my dresser they removed the drawers and my panty drawer was on full view for the entire installation. Did they need to see my panties in order to put in the hardwood? I suppose so. See? Hardwood installation is a WEALTH of comic material. Of course, now my panty drawer is very dusty, which seems like a euphemism but isn't.

On that note, I'm off to clean! Happy Friday, everyone.

P.S. In the comments, Tonggu Momma asked if I wanted to pet the floors. I do. I do want to pet them. They are so nice. I think maybe I should open the windows to let the fumes out, what think?

It's quiet. A little TOO quiet.

Today was the big day. Not back to school – that was last week. Today was the day we were slated to get the hardwood installed. It was no mean feat getting ready for the installation, given that we were out of town for the long weekend. All moveable items were moved, all clothing, toys, and breakable items stashed in the basement. Then this morning we got the phone call that they were delayed and wouldn’t start until tomorrow.

Sigh.

I was under the expectation that I would drop the boys off – Jake’s first full morning of kindergarten after last week’s frantic pace of staggered entry – and then I would come home to chaos and noise and instead it is so very quiet. Even the dog is still at the kennel. I’m lonely. And I’m also unable to find anything, and I keep bumping into things.

This is the view of my office right now. Halp.

We were in Saskatchewan this weekend, visiting with my grandparents. My grandfather turned 96 on Saturday, which is quite a feat, I think. Last year there was a huge family reunion for his 95th birthday, which was initially supposed to be somewhat of a surprise party, much to my strong disapproval. Who thinks that a surprise party is a good idea for a 95 year old man? NOT ME. Anyway, at the reunion last year I had the sad feeling that it would be the last time I would see my grandfather – he was not doing particularly well and, in any case, he was 95. One does not buy green bananas when one is 95. But here he is! He looked great and was in good spirits and I was very happy we had made the trip. Plus my grandma made a scrumptious lemon poppyseed chiffon cake, of which I ate slice after slice.

One thing about travelling with kids is that it can be exhausting. We stayed in a hotel and so the kids were WIRED and no one was sleeping particularly well, with the obvious result that we were all a bit crabby when we started the two hour drive to the airport yesterday morning. A mere ten minutes into the drive, Jake morphed into a surly little goblin, “This is taking FOREVER. When are we going to be HOME? I’M NOT TIRED. I JUST WANT TO GO HOME. THIS CAR IS MAKING ME HOMESICK.” We listened to this diatribe many, many times. I stared out the window at the unvarying landscape of flooded fields and pumpjacks, all the while thinking “I can see for miles and miles. I can see for miles and miles. I can see for miles and miles and miles and miles.”

So how was your long weekend? I’m feeling kind of blah today, tell me something good?

NOT crazy. Just hormonally deranged.

The first day of school went great, so I will not bore you with the details. Instead, allow me to tell you what happened on the last day of summer vacation.

It was cold and rainy. I thought a fun activity would be to print out invitations for Jake’s birthday and then have the kids decorate them, which was quite inspired except that the printer was not working. After an hour of online troubleshooting I had to make a decision: just let it go and get on with life or call the technical assistance line. I made the phone call.

Just to interrupt the narrative, it is imperative that you understand – if you do not already know this about me – that I am a crier. I cry for most emotions but especially for frustration and anger. The reader can well imagine how poorly suited I was to working in an open area trade floor, an environment in which I would frequently be sworn at (“This fucking model you made is a piece of shit. It doesn’t fucking update.” “Did you press the update button?” “I shouldn’t have to press a fucking BUTTON. It should just fucking update automatically! FUCK!” Cue crying.) After searching for printer related answers and then being transferred three times, I was very frustrated.

So by the time the final technical support person answered, I was sobbing hysterically. This may seem like an overreaction to the matter at hand and so it was. Perhaps was I a) expressing repressed emotions at the end of school, b) going crazy at last, or c) getting my period? If you answered c), ding ding ding!

I was, at this point, crying so hard I couldn’t speak, but instead was gasping out my printing issues. The technical support person was very soothing. “Ma’am, I will stay on the line if you need a moment to collect yourself. Ma’am, perhaps you would like a drink of water? Ma’am, you just relax now. I am going to take care of everything.” Poor guy. I mean, his job must pretty much suck. He’s a technical support person at a call centre. Probably the premenstrually deranged lunatic was the best call he’d had all day. Probably he deals mostly with irate people demanding to know why their screens were blank, when in fact they hadn’t turned their monitors on, or people screaming about their crappy printers, when in fact their printers weren’t plugged in. At least I was polite, if unintelligible.

My technical support person and I spent one hundred and five minutes on the phone before he came to the conclusion that my printer issue was strange enough to warrant a brand new printer, which actually arrived today, to which I say that is some good customer service. I wonder if crying had anything to do with it. It has never helped me in getting out of speeding tickets, probably because I could win an award for Least Attractive Crier: blotchy, red, and swollen. In any case, I was completely astonished by the result and thanked him many, many times. “You are welcome. Again. All right now, ma’am. Ma’am? Yes, you are welcome. All right, now you have a nice day!”

The rest of the day I felt like I had a hangover, from crying so much. With that stunning denouement to the summer, I was all ready for school today.


Too cool for school. Only after they chose their outfits and I had taken the picture and dropped them at school did I realize that they wore those exact same shirts on the first day of school last year. MOM FAIL.