Monthly Archives: December 2010

Be Kind Resolution, or How I Resolved to Drink More Wine

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In the height of holiday overindulgence last week, a good friend said “I didn’t want to make New Year’s resolutions, but at this point it’s impossible not to.”  I understood.  I’m not generally one for traditional New Year’s resolutions, although I am feeling kind of bloated and sugar high from my own indulgences.  But, as a jovial older colleague used to say “It’s not what you eat between Christmas and New Year’s, it’s what you eat between New Year’s and Christmas”, which is, I think, very astute.  Unless of course your regular diet consists exclusively of Double Downs, Coke, and Sour Patch Kids, in which case a change just may be required.
In other words, I am looking forward to getting back into regular routine next week, one that will contain much less mint chocolate, given that it is quickly disappearing from my kitchen. 
I do have a New Year’s resolution this year, and that is to entertain more, go on more coffee dates, and enjoy wine with friends more.  As opposed to enjoying wine while sitting on my couch in pajamas watching Jeopardy and stating answers in the form of questions, which I’m still going to do.  One cannot make drastic changes overnight.
That’s the thing about resolutions and their high percentage of failure – the rate of which I don’t know exactly, but I would hypothesize it to be 99%.  I mean, who really keeps resolutions?  Well, I did last year but that is because my resolution was to learn how to bake bread, which I did by mid-January, with the assistance of the best cookbook ever, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which I recommend and wish I was getting a marketing fee for the number of times I mention it to people.  Artisan Bread people, are you listening?
Where was I going with this?  Oh yes.  Keeping resolutions.
A little while ago I went to a workshop with this lovely woman, who spoke about compassion.  If you wish to be a truly compassionate person, she said, you need to start with yourself.  It’s true, isn’t it?  Aren’t we our own worst critics?  Nowhere is that more apparent than when you are in a room with people making New Year’s resolutions.  I don’t think that there is anything wrong with wanting to change bad behaviours, or trying to achieve a goal, but can we agree to do it in a more compassionate, more loving way?  Perhaps try to walk more or eat healthier in order to feel better, rather than the standard lose-weight-exercise-more-I-am-a-big-fat-whore?  Self loathing is very destructive, and this is why I think most resolutions are never kept – they are based in unkindness towards oneself.  If changes are needed, implement them with kindness and compassion and joy, rather than punitively.
This is why my resolution is to be with and enjoy my friends’ company more.  My prediction is that 2011 will be a very good year.
Are you making resolutions this year?  If so, what are they?  (Remember: be kind to yourself!)

This is the end, Christmassy friend.

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It’s all over, people.  I know some people leave their tree and decorations up until the New Year, some people leave them up until Epiphany, but my festive spirit and accompanying décor had been up for over a month and it was high time to reclaim the living room.
Yesterday I looked around me and saw a million Lego pieces scattered on the floor, along with Playmobil animals and Egyptian artifacts, puzzle pieces, and board games.  The Zen thought about not being able to control others, only yourself floated through my mind.  I wanted to dismantle all holiday decorations but my husband was ill, god help me, I didn’t think I could take down the seven foot tree on my own.  I drummed my fingers on the table for a while, looking around at the chaos, and then started hauling all the boxes up from the storage room.  Remember the one time I fixed the gutters?  I am invincible, I am woman, I could take down the tree. 
There were some minor protests from the kids when I started taking down all the decorations, to no avail.  Mark, realizing he and Jake were powerless to stop me, started to help.  Soon I had everything down but the tree, and I was ready to take it on, but at the eleventh hour my husband rallied and did it for me.  Possibly he was alarmed by my fervor, although he should be used to it by now, seeing as we have spent twelve Christmases together.  The living room, like the Grinch’s heart, seems to have grown three sizes in the absence of the holiday décor.
I feel decluttered.  Unfortunately there is one area in the house that is not decluttered, and that is the kitchen.  There are no fewer than fourteen boxes of chocolates of various varieties in there.  Some, like the giant box of peppermint Lindor, are exclusively mine.  I am now faced with a decision.  Should I freeze some, should I aim to eat a reasonable daily amount over the next few weeks, or should I consume them all, immediately, in order to destroy them so they will not tempt me with their minty goodness?  The former two seem to be the wiser, if less exalted, solutions. 
How was your Christmas?  I was the happy recipient of many lovely gifts, including several books from my in-laws that I had requested.  I wrote up a list so long ago I actually forgot what I had on it, so opening them was like being a pleasantly surprised and cheerful amnesiac.  The one I started reading first was a biography of Louisa May Alcott.  Let me tell you, if you want to feel good about the miracles of modern medicine, read about the life of a nineteenth-century woman.  Talk about women’s issues: practically every woman in the book so far has suffered through numerous pregnancies, miscarriages, stillbirths, deaths of their children, and – unsurprisingly – many of them subsequently die in childbirth.  Not exactly cheerful but it does make one thankful for what we have.  Which is what the holidays should be about, really.  Thankfulness and joy.
And I have a lot to be thankful for.  I also have a lot of mint chocolate, some of which is going to be consumed imminently.  Tell me about your Christmas – was it lovely?  I hope so.

Tomorrow is Christmas! It’s practically here!

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Remember when you were a kid, how difficult it was to wait for Christmas and how you would get all crazy and frantic waiting for the minute you could get up on Christmas morning, and quite possibly you drove all the adults in the vicinity a little bit insane with your incessant chatter and odd behaviour?  That is exactly the situation in my house right now!  I emphasize with the kids.  I do.  But I’m not sure why their pre-Christmas excitement manifests itself in running through the house naked, whipping each other with their underwear and remarking on the various qualities of their penises.  “Just get dressed, you guys,” I sigh and they respond with entirely irrelevant remarks.  “When Jake and I are grown-ups we are going to live in the same house and have dink fights every time we go to the bathroom!” Mark informed me.  I’m not even sure what that means and I prefer not to delve any further into it. 
“Here’s your early Christmas present!” Jake said, giving me a kiss.  I smiled at this sweet gesture which was promptly followed by “Oops.  I tooted.  It’s stinky.  I guess you got another present you maybe don’t like!  A stinky toot!”  I started to think that Bailey’s in my coffee might be a good idea.
I was planning to write a Festivus post yesterday airing all my grievances when I realized that I don’t really have any grievances.  Except possibly the fact that my children perpetually look like hobos.  Here’s a million dollar idea for all you entrepreneurial types: jeans that have quadruple-enforced knees.  Why has no one come up with this yet?  Is it a conspiracy by the clothing companies to get moms to constantly need to purchase replacements?  Yesterday I went through their drawers only to find endless pairs of jeans with gigantic rips in at least one knee each.  The only reason I care is because it is Christmas, dammit, and my mother will inevitably comment on their slovenliness.  My parents are coming over for dinner tonight at which I am making a roast beef, strangely enough, with butternut squash soup for the vegetarians in the crowd (i.e., me).  Last night we were at a party, and someone asked me how I get enough protein, which gave me the giggles, but since the people at the party were some of my husband’s colleagues, I did not feel the response I wanted to give was appropriate.  Funny, but inappropriate.
Merry Christmas to all of you, and thank you for reading.  Your readership is a gift to me every day and I appreciate it so much.  I hope your holidays are filled with much joy and happiness, and very few grievances.  xo

It came without ribbons! It came without tags!

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The impending combination of lunar eclipse, full moon, winter solstice, and winter break is wreaking havoc on my house.  Faced with the first day of no school, Mark unravelled a little bit.  I have noticed this phenomenon before, and so I know it is short lived, which is fortunate, because otherwise I would need to lock myself in the bathroom with a bottle of wine and a Candace Bushnell novel.  It’s not like it is some go-with-the-flow free-for-all around here.  The boys still get dressed in the morning and we maintain some semblance of a routine, even on holidays, but even so Mark has a tendency to unravel in the face of freedom from school routines.  So far he has drawn upwards of twenty pictures today, coloured in his Bakugan sticker book, and reorganized his collection of dinosaurs and Bakugan balls.  All that in between snapping at his brother who, in the face of freedom from school routines, copes by hugging, pulling at, and generally invading Mark’s personal space.  Hence my longing for chick lit and wine.  As I said, though, if history is any indication, by tomorrow things will be running much more smoothly around here.
It probably doesn’t help that my kids are also completely jacked up on sugar, thanks to the generosity of my beautiful friends who are responsible for my kitchen full of delicious treats including chocolates, homemade truffles and candies, and miniature cakes in the shapes of gifts, complete with fondant bows and decorations.  Not to mention many bottles of wine, which just goes to show how well they know me.  Did I mention I love my friends?  I love my friends.  I’m so blessed.
When we talk to the kids about Christmas we try to focus on time with friends and family, good food, joy, and love, but inevitably things come down to gifts.  I think gifts are a lovely part of Christmas – I still recall the feeling of seeing the dollhouse my grandfather made for me when I was five – but I do find it curious that if you are attempting to shift the focus away from getting, the first thing people ask your children is what they asked Santa Claus for.  Everywhere we are inundated with messages of consumerism, and commercialism, and your-Christmas-will-be-ruined-if-you-get-the-wrong-gift, and I find it fairly vile.  It reminds me of commercials for engagement rings, of the “show her how much you love her” variety.  When it became apparent that my husband and I would be married, I spoke out against diamond rings as a tool for commercialism, artificially inflated values, and ostentatious displays of wealth.  Tool of the patriarchy and a strike against feminism!  And so I don’t have a diamond ring, smart girl that I am.
It’s a hard balance.  I think my children have so much that they couldn’t possibly want or need anything else, I think sometimes they are completely spoiled and indulged, and yet we do buy our children toys and books at Christmas, and they do get many things from their doting grandparents and aunts and uncles, and if you think for one second that I’m going to call up my mother-in-law and tell her not to send her only two grandchildren any more gifts because they already have more than enough, well, then you have another think coming.  The only result of that kind of conversation would be of the “No One Here Gets Out Alive” variety.  And so I try to suggest gift ideas that will allow for much creative play, and that will last a long time, and that will not break instantly so that they can eventually be donated when outgrown.  I want my kids to enjoy their gifts, but more than anything I want for them to remember the holidays as a time of tree decorating and gingerbread disasters, and playing in the snow and parties with friends.  I want them to appreciate what they have and remember those who want for things, and yet still enjoy the pleasures of childhood.  Is that too large of a Christmas wish?

Nicole the Elf! What’s your favourite song?

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Today is the last day of school before the break, and I’m relieved.  There was a time when I did not understand this phenomenon, but I do now.  It’s not like our mornings are crazily rushed – by the time the school bell rings the kids have been up for a minimum of two hours, and I’ve been up for at least four.  This is a good thing because to save my sanity I inform Jake that he must start getting dressed at 8:00, so by the time we leave the house at 8:45 he is generally dressed.  Except for socks, which for some reason must only be put on right before boots and with much encouragement from me. 
But oh, I am ready for a break!  My holiday spirit took a little bit of a beating this week and it was all because of the pediatric dentist.  I now have reminders to never again make a dental appointment in December.  The dentist’s office shares a parking lot with Wal-Mart.  Have you attempted to find parking in a Wal-Mart parking lot at 1:00 in the afternoon ten days before Christmas?  I do not recommend it.  There are angry people everywhere.  Very, very angry people.  So I was feeling a bit flustered even before the appointment, which in itself is a trying experience: I have one child who sits quietly, mouth wide open, for the entire process, and one who seems to have some sort of sensory integration issues the minute the chair goes back as he starts to go stiff, hold his breath, and gag.  It’s sad because he is truly trying his best, he really is, he sits perfectly still for x-rays and teeth counting but the second the hygienist snaps that little toothpaste container on her finger, he goes a little nuts.  So that was fun. 
Then, the dentist came in.  Remember the dentist?  The very attractive dentist?  Well, evidently the past six months have not been good to him because I would not now describe him as the hot, crush-inspiring pediatric dentist he once was.  Of course, that is very shallow and superficial of me but come on.  I’m a stay-at-home mom.  I wore my nice jeans and my good lipstick.  Throw me a bone, here, people.
By the end of the appointment, I had a choice: I could just keep Mark home for the remainder of the afternoon, or I could rush him back to school in time for him to have recess and sing carols, only to rush back to the school to pick him up.  Lazy mom that I am, I just went home.  I was in need of some holiday spirit.  So I decided to make gingerbread people with the kids and listen to Christmas carols.
What’s your favourite Christmas song?  Mine is – despite assertions from certain people that this song causes brain aneurisms – the Wham! Christmas song.  I listened to it a number of times and felt much better.  Also on my list, Santa Baby, which I know is commercial and everything I try not to be but hey, it is so much fun to sing.  I like to sing it in a slutty, I’m-a-lounge-singer-who-is-lying-on-a-grand-piano-wearing-a-spangly-dress-slit-up-the-side kind of way.  With a long cigarette holder.  You get the picture.  Although I have to wonder, what is the market for sables like these days?  Is the fur industry even around anymore?  I don’t know.  Tied for third are Feliz Navidad and Mele Kalikimaka: “Hey!” Mark said, “I think that means Merry Christmas in another language!”
So tell me, what do you like to listen to around the holidays?  The one song I cannot stand is I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.  It is just way too creepy.  It just conjures up images of, how shall I put this politely, a child stumbling into an intimate situation involving lap sitting and queries of “Have you been a good girl this year?”  If you know what I’m saying. 
On that note, here are some g-rated pictures of me attempting to get the children to a) look at me and b) smile while making gingerbread.  You can see how well I succeeded.
“Okay guys, look at me.”

“Guys, look at me.”

“Okay, good, Jake, but maybe with a less angry face.”

“Um.”

“Mark, I meant to look and smile, not start eating the cookies.”

Yeah.  So I didn’t get the picture I was hoping for.  But it was fun!

Adventures in Gingerbread

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Well, it’s the holiday season, and you know what that means!

Look at those excited faces. 

GINGERBREAD HOUSES!

I have to admit, I was pretty nervous about the whole thing.  It’s not like I pretend to be Amazing Crafty Mom, but remember last year?

Note the sad, sliding wreath, stopped only by the sad, sliding candy door.

Those yellow candies were supposed to be gravestones.

The window.  The WINDOW.

The cheerful, giant gingerbread man who lives in this shambles of a house.
When I assembled our materials, what kept me going was the thought that it couldn’t possibly be worse than last year.  And happily, it wasn’t.  I followed some advice I received after last year’s disaster: a) Buy a kit that has pre-made icing, and b) buy a kit that has the house already assembled.  Let me tell you, for all who may wish to make a gingerbread house but are as poorly equipped to do so as I am, those two pieces of advice are worth their weight in gold.
I guess advice doesn’t actually weigh anything.  Let me rephrase: those two pieces of advice ARE gold.

The kids happily decorated and ate the stale, crunchy candy.  Things stuck to the house and it looks kind of cute, I think.

It looked cute enough that I set it on the coffee table as a decoration.  I was supremely proud – the house was not hideous, and I had just created Christmas cheer!  Just like that!  The coffee table looked festive and decorated.  But I forgot about the wild card that is my dog.

Barkley’s a really good dog, despite his penchant for consuming his own frozen fecal material and vomit.  He likes to be obedient, and he doesn’t like to be scolded.  I placed the gingerbread house on the low coffee table, looked at him sternly, and said the magic words, the words that work, as will be seen, most, but not all of the time “Leave it”.

Gingerbread to a dog seems to be like crack cocaine to a junkie.  He licked it.  Now, normally that wouldn’t bother me because it is not like we are actually going to eat the gingerbread house given that it could be years old and who would know?  It’s rock hard and pretty disgusting.  I bake gingerbread and it’s delicious, but that stuff that comes in a box from who-knows-where?  No one is eating that.  Unfortunately, once Barkley got a lick of that gingerbread house he needed more.  Just one more hit, man.  Just one.  Then he transformed into a dog who was actually on crack cocaine.  I think it was the coloured sugar pathway I had creatively added to the cardboard.  He started bounding around the living room, wagging his tail frantically and nudging each person with his nose before moving on and nudging everyone all over again. 

I thought maybe I should take him for a walk, which ended up to be the most insane walk of all, with him pulling on his leash and practically pulling me off my feet.  He sniffed the ground in a crazy, uneven fashion which made me worry that I had actually ruined my dog.  As soon as we got home he bowled me over running inside straight to the coffee table where he stood there looking completely bereft as my husband had moved the gingerbread house to the higher end table.  Then he sadly curled up on his bed and passed out.

I’m happy to report he is back to normal now.

Sure, the house looks good.  But look at our attempt at a gingerbread tree. 

Baby It’s Cold Outside, aka The Holiday Date-Rape Song

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I was sick this week with a weird little illness that manifested itself as a sore throat, tight chest, and overwhelming exhaustion.  Today is the first day I haven’t felt as though if I closed my eyes for more than a blink, I would succumb to narcoleptic urges.  Unfortunately I woke up with no voice – NO VOICE; how to communicate with children? – but it has started to come back now so I can issue commands without the children ignoring me unconsciously (as opposed to the conscious ignoring) or having them answer “What?  WHAT?  I can’t hear you!”
The boys have been in swimming lessons with their school all week, and this always seems perverse to me: swimming in the frigid city-run pools, then walking back to the school in sub-zero temperatures.  The boys seem to be completely depleted by these lessons, or else they have what I have, because this whole week they have become progressively more and more tired.  At lunchtime yesterday, Mark started asking if he had to go back to school in the afternoon; he was soooo tired.  Normally I would have just kept him home, as it was very cold out and the thought of getting everyone dressed and out the door, again, was just too tiring.  After all, how much actual schooling gets done on a Friday afternoon (which is only 80 minutes long) one week before winter break?  This is where homeschoolers have the win.  THE WIN.  However, both his snowpants and backpack were still at school, the boys had haircuts after school, then we had to pick the dog up from the groomers…and I convinced Mark to “just keep going” and promised that after all of that we would just curl up on the couch and watch The Charlie Brown Christmas.  As it turns out, Mark’s class just went to his Grade Five “Buddy” class – the school pairs up older kids with younger ones in a buddy system – and watched Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  Clearly a LOT of schooling goes on a Friday afternoon one week before winter break.  While Mark was learning about reindeer and their exclusionary tactics, I set Jake up with Starfall on my laptop and proceeded to make all the beds with flannel sheets fresh from the dryer.  Is that a good idea when one is exhausted?  No, it is not.  It took every ounce of willpower not to crawl between those sheets, those cozy, fuzzy, warm-from-the-dryer sheets.
I’m happy to have some energy back today. 
I have great holiday mojo, holiday chores do not get me down, with one exception: gift wrapping.  I decided that I must wrap gifts today, and THREE HOURS later, I finished.  I considered throwing in the proverbial towel and forcing my husband to do it, but he was busy repainting our bedroom, so I kind of felt like I should be doing something productive.  So I wrapped gifts for three hours.  The issue isn’t the number of gifts I have to wrap, it is that I am completely incompetent with gift wrap.  It looks like a three-year-old wrapped my gifts and I don’t even have a three-year-old in the house.  In fact, the two gifts that Jake helped me wrap look significantly better than anything I did on my own.  I don’t know what my problem is.  I always have way too much paper, or not enough, and my hair evidently falls out from the strain because strands of it are always stuck in the tape, or the tape gets stuck on my nails and takes off my nail polish, and then the ribbon.  My word, the ribbon.  How does one make a bow that doesn’t look like something my dog chewed on or, alternately, some kind of poky, pointy, Sputnik-like object that one stuck on an oblong, weirdly shaped, strange cornered parcel?  WHAT IS THE SECRET TO TYING A PRETTY BOW???  By the time I was nearing the end of the gifts, I was pretty much like “FUCK THIS.  NO MORE BOWS.  I HATE ALL OF YOU.  NO BOWS FOR ANYONE.”
So maybe not the Christmas spirit.  I really need my voice to come back full force so I can start with my White Christmas rendition, or Mele Kalikimaka, or even Baby It’s Cold Outside (or as I like to call it, the Holiday Date-Rape Song!).  After all, the best way to spread Christmas cheer is by singing loud for all to hear!  And maybe having a glass of wine.  That should bolster my spirits.