Monthly Archives: September 2011

State of Wonder, Gifts, My New Unpaid Career

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Here’s a little piece of advice: if you are a stay-at-home mom whose children are in school, and you are worried about how to spend your time, try signing up for numerous volunteer commitments, each of which isn’t too time consuming on its own, but when added together fill all your days with unpaid busyness.  I’m finding my days are just flying by.  Who knew?  It’s also been incredibly warm – hot even – and beautiful here, and so I’m completely stunned that October is in TWO DAYS, and also, did I move someplace with a good climate without knowing it?

I’m not complaining though – my life is pretty fun and flexible and despite the fact that I’m writing an advice column for our community newsletter – I kid you not, I have advice to give – I still managed to have coffee with two good friends this week and I finished reading “State of Wonder”, which I recommend highly.  Mostly I want to talk about it to someone.  It’s a fascinating book that brings up the question “How old is too old to have children”?  In the book, a doctor is studying a tribe in the Amazon, the women of which continue to give birth until they die, the average life span being around 70.  The thought of having a baby’s head coming out of a 70 year old vagina is kind of squeamy, to me, although I guess the pregnancy hormones would make for some luscious old-lady hair.  But seriously, how old is too old?  I don’t have any answers; although a girlfriend and I have discussed this, relative to our older husbands.  Since men don’t really have a biological clock, not really, is there a point where they are “too old” to have children?  Way back in my long-ago youth, I was a candy striper at an old age facility, and I can’t really imagine any of those people in an expectant parent state, but at what point do we get there?  Discuss.

I had an interesting conversation with regards to gifts and spouses.  I’m finding it’s not uncommon for spouses to not give gifts to each other at birthdays, Christmas, etc.  My husband and I do give each other gifts, although the gifts are generally not surprises.  Mostly I like to state my preferences for certain items, and am sure to let him know what size I wear.  His birthday is coming up, and although almost every single year I give him golf balls and a golf shirt, this year is going to be different!  It won’t be surprising to him though.  I suppose we could skip the whole gift wrap and opening steps, since we both tend to be specific on the things that we like, but what would be the fun in that? 

So here are our discussion topics for the day: a) how old were you when you had children, and how old is “too old” to have children, and b) do you and your spouse give each other gifts, and if so, are they ever a surprise? 

Charity Birthday Parties, or the post where I have strong opinions about birthdays

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I frequently look at my house and feel like I’m drowning in stuff.  I’m not even talking about Mark’s extensive “rock collection” (“Maybe we should get him a rock polisher for Christmas!” my husband suggested cheerfully, to my horror – how many MORE rocks would we then have in the house?).  I’m not talking about the fact that my fridge is threatening to implode from the sheer volume of artwork that is either festooning it via magnets or piled in a scary high stack on top of it.  Those are things I can handle (although not the idea of a rock polisher, heaven forfend). 

We’re in an awkward stage, toy wise.  The problem I’m facing right now is that my children still build complicated tracks with their wooden Thomas toys, they use both the junior Duplo Lego AND the teeny tiny big kid Lego, they play with dinosaurs AND stuffed animals, they stage car races with dozens and dozens of little Hot Wheels, they play with board games and superhero action figures.  In other words, there is nothing in the house that I can in good conscience donate or otherwise get rid of.  We are literally drowning in the volume of toys that we have and I have not been able to donate anything that was unused since I boxed up all the Little People sets and Mega Blocks. 

So when we were planning Jake’s birthday party, there was no question: no gifts.  We did this last year as well; on the invitations I specified that in lieu of gifts, each guest was asked to bring a food bank donation.  One of the things I most dislike about other children’s parties are buying gifts for them – I never know what to get, I never know if they have something or not, and I generally feel overwhelmed and confused while trolling the aisles of the toy store.  Food donations – easy.  And let me tell you, people stepped up!

Having a charity birthday party is a very good way to introduce children to the concept of giving and what I consider to be the responsibility of people who are more fortunate than others.  My children are, I think, extremely fortunate and lucky children; they receive many gifts from aunts and uncles, grandparents, and us.  There were fifteen children at Jake’s party; he would not need, and should not have, fifteen little gifts. 

In order to have a successful charity party, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.  First, make sure your child is in agreement – have a discussion about charities and giving and be sure to reiterate that they ARE going to get gifts from family members, just not from their little friends.  We can only expect so much.  Second, make sure the party is going to be a lot of fun – the focus of a birthday party, or any party, should really be the good time we are all having, rather than gifts.  We held the party at the Calgary Gymnastics Centre, and it was fabulous.  The kids all had a blast, there was no downtime, and there was only thirty minutes of “party room” time which is where I find parties to really drag. 

Third, make sure you have good food.  Since our party was from 3-5 pm, I did not want to have a huge snack for the kids right before the dinner hour, so I just served cupcakes.  We had a guest with Celiac disease, and so I branched out and made both regular and gluten free cupcakes, and they were equally – but differently – delicious.
Can you tell which are gluten free?  (Hint: the short ones).

The last thing to remember about having a successful charity party is do not forget the loot bags.  I know.  I know.  Loot bags are a scourge on society, but really, you CAN have loot bags and not lose your essence of yourself if you choose carefully.  I gave each child a little egg of Silly Putty – my kids once received those from a dinner guest of mine and they played with it for months after, so hooray for longevity and non-breakable-ness – an eraser shaped like a crayon, and a ton of candy.  Fortunately Halloween candy has been in the stores for over a month now, so I bought several large bags of rockets, bubble gum, and candy necklaces.  I gauged the party’s success from the sheer joy that volume of candy brought to the guests.  Our little gluten-free guest was particularly overjoyed as she opened her bag.  “ROCKETS?  Nicole, I’m ALLOWED to have Rockets!” she shrieked.

Success!  At the end of the day, we had a giant box of food donations AND a group of happy, exhausted, and sugar-high children.  What could be better?

Save the drama for your mama.

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I try to write quality posts and occasionally I try to write beautiful posts and yesterday I checked my statistics to see why, specifically, people visit this blog.  Is it my views on parenting, on mindful living, on good karma and kindness?

Here are some of the popular search terms that have been used to find my blog:

1) Cougar moms and velour tracksuits.
2) 16 year old girls with whale tails.
3) Boys stripping girls in their house. *although this has also been spelled “boyz striping girls in there house”, but that kind of spelling gives me squidgies.*
4) Boy and fack girl in the house.
5) Asam Sandler singing into ex-girlfriends intercom  *That is how it is spelled.  I altered neither the spelling nor the punctuation, despite my squidgies.*

All of which is to say, I must have a lot of disappointed blog visitors.  Perhaps I should talk more about my velour tracksuits.

The past few days has seen a lot of sadness and difficulties for various friends and family, the details of which I am not going to go into, but I seem to be coping by baking things.  There are worse coping mechanisms, I suppose (like drinking, which I am doing right this second).  Tomorrow we are having a birthday party for Jake and 13 little friends, and so I have been a cupcake baking machine.  We have two guests coming who are unable to eat wheat and/or gluten, and so I made a batch of gluten free cupcakes.  I was a bit concerned as to how they would turn out; I read some recipes in Chatelaine magazine (don’t judge, I AM a suburban Canadian mother) but I became completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of different flours and ingredients required.  My dearest friend, who has a daughter with Celiac disease, suggested Pamela’s Products, and I have to say, the result was not bad at all.  The cupcakes were only one inch high but they were tasty.  The package suggested adding an extra egg for extra light cupcakes, and I will say this: if you need to make gluten free cupcakes and there is an option to make them “extra light”, ADD THE EGG.  I can’t imagine how dense the result would be if you, as the package suggested, added less water for a more dense cake. 

So it’s the birthday party tomorrow and I am sure I will have much to say about that, but for now, I think I might go sample another cupcake and refill my wineglass.  I hope your weekend is going well, my lovelies.

Mullets and Me

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Just the other day I saw a woman, who was about my age or a little older, wearing skin tight acid wash jeans.  I looked at her for a minute, trying to decide if this was a new trend and that is what the young folks are wearing these days, or if she had been wearing those jeans since the eighties.  Based on their style, I would have to vote for the latter. 

I’ve been thinking about style lately and how it changes and how it can be very confusing for women of a certain age, and by that I mean women of my age.  Specifically, me.  I want to look attractive and fashionable but yet I don’t want to look like a crazed cougar wearing styles that are clearly not meant for me.  Although, saying that, some current styles are really not suitable for anyone, i.e., jeggings.  I want to buy clothes that are an investment, that will last for a long time, but not so long that I find myself wearing trendy clothes twenty three years past their prime, as in the woman with the high quality acid wash jeans. 

What’s a mom to wear these days?  Specifically, what’s a stay at home mom to wear?  We all know it’s a job, blah blah blah, but really – there are no rules.  It’s like Casual Fridays at my old place of employment; people would wear everything from mini skirts and tees to pajama pants and sandals.  I came across this piece about Fabulous Moms versus Yoga Moms and I felt extremely conflicted, and slightly, but unspecifically, offended.  I would like to think that those of us who come to school drop-off wearing saucy jeans and heels can associate freely with those of us who show up in, as the author quotes, “yoga pants and Birkenstocks”.

Although, I have to take issue with Birkenstocks.  I know, I know, Birkenstocks have changed and expanded their product selection, and I know, I know, there are many cute new Birkenstock styles out there – just like Sorel boots – but I have a very negative association with them.  Intellectually I know there are cute, feminine Birkenstocks, but emotionally I associate them with my macroeconomics professor who used to walk barefoot through the filthy lecture hall, wipe his grimy feet on his own jeans, and then slide those same, slightly less dirty feet into a pair of Birkenstocks.  This is the same professor who, when I wore a tight trendy t-shirt with French writing across it, said “Does your shirt say ‘Look at my tits?’?  Because it’s working.”  True story.  So let’s agree that if we are talking about the new, cute styles of Birkenstocks, we shall call them something else.  Birkencutes?  Babestocks? 

Where am I going with this?  I don’t know.  I DO know that I worry about losing self-awareness about my own appearance and just looking like one of those inappropriately dressed and styled women.  I don’t want to end up in O magazine’s makeover issue like this woman:

Business in the front, party in the back!
I mean, I’m not worried about LITERALLY turning into this woman – I certainly don’t have a mullet – but this woman has had the same hairstyle since 1985 and, since no one CUTS hair like this anymore, she has been maintaining her own style.  Yikes.  This concerns me.  I’ve had some variation on the long, wavy hairstyle for many, many years, the only changes have been in colour and number and length of layers.  Will I one day wake up to an intervention about modernizing my haircut, like Mullet Lady?  Will I one day find myself in O magazine, complaining about the inability to find someone to style my hair the way it suits me, because no stylist wants to be associated with me?  Will I one day notice people staring at me, not because I’m all that and a bag of chips, but because I’ve become a fashion relic?
So here is my plea to you, dear readers.  Don’t let me turn into Mullet Lady.  Please.

Struggling

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For his birthday, my sister-in-law and brother gave Jake a number of easy-reader books, some featuring his new favourite character, Finn McMissile.  Jake picked them up and read them to me, only needing help on a few of the words.  What a smart little boy, I thought. 

He is a smart boy.  He can read and spell things phonetically and he has exceptional aptitude for numbers and patterns.  He has an incredible imagination, he builds interesting Lego structures and he can make up elaborate stories and scenarios.  He is very bright.

But he doesn’t think so.

He has trouble with his printing and his fine motor skills – his printing is very neat and accurate, but it is difficult for him and takes a great deal of effort.  He has seen occupational therapists and he has a tutor; he has hyper flexible joints and so pencil control is difficult.  I don’t know if you have had a child in Grade One, but the curriculum is very heavy on printing, colouring, and drawing. 

The first couple weeks of school have been fine; I’ve expected Jake to be more tired than he is.  I’ve expected him to have difficulty adjusting to the new routines, but he hasn’t.  But it’s coming out in different ways, I’m finding, it’s coming out as anxiety about doing well at school.  He seems to feel that if he cannot do something perfectly, the very first time, then he is not good at that thing and he never will be.

It’s very frustrating.  Even more frustrating is that I am kind of the same way.  I was a very anxious child; I needed to be perfect at everything I did, I bit my nails to the quick for two decades, I had problems sleeping,  I was constantly worried that some disaster would befall – maybe the house would burn down while I was in bed, maybe ferocious animals would escape from the zoo and eat me alive, maybe every one of my friends would move away and I would have no one to talk to.

I also remember erasing all my work and starting over because it didn’t look quite right.  I remember that feeling and I think about Jake feeling that way and it makes me feel ill.

When our children struggle in the same exact way we struggled, we have the tendency to forget important points: that struggles are character building, that struggles make us who we are, that struggles are part of life.  What I need to do is allow Jake to struggle – with help and support, of course, always with encouragement – but what I want to do is erase his struggles altogether. 

It makes me just feel like crying, baby, ’cause baby, something beautiful’s dying.

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“There’s a new Tim Hortons commercial that’s going to make you cry,” my husband called from the living room.  “I’ve already seen it AND cried this morning.”  I replied.  Oh, Tim Hortons and their tear-jerking commercials.  Years after it first aired, my husband can still say, stiffly, “I come watch” and I will tear up. 

But it’s not just Tim Hortons’ commercials.  I’m an emotional wreck these days.  In other words, I should not have, in hindsight, spent the afternoon of Jake’s sixth birthday watching videos of him and his brother from when they were small.  What was I thinking?  I wasn’t, clearly.  I’m suffering from some kind of pre-empty-nest syndrome.  Last night there was a barbeque at the school and when a friend asked if I was going, I replied that no, I was just going to stay home and be sad.

What a pill.  Fortunately, Top Gun was on TV and, like a moth to a flame, I found myself watching it.  It’s not even a guilty pleasure.  It’s just a pleasure.  They don’t make movies like that anymore.  I have been watching it for twenty-five years and it just never gets old.  “The plaque for the alternates is down the hall in the ladies’ room.”  STILL FUNNY.  It makes me want to go visit a bar near an air force base just to see if the pickup lines “I’m a pilot.  Actually, a naval aviator.” would still be used.  Of course, I’m not sure I fit the demographic that those delivering the pickup lines would be looking for, but one could hope.  Never have I been serenaded by a group of naval aviators singing “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” but it could totally happen. 

There has always been much talk about the glossy, oiled-up, homoerotic volleyball scene (“Playing…playing with the boys!”) and every time I see that movie I rewind that scene at least three times.  Iceman…because that’s the way he flies, ice cold with no mistakes.  Whew!  I saw that movie in my formative years and I swear it set me up for a lifelong enjoyment of the bad boy/asshole.  No soft and sensitive guy for me, it seems, which is probably a good thing.  I think I have enough softness and sensitivity to go around.  Of course, after watching the movie I felt like pounding away on my piano and yelling to my husband “Hey you big stud!  Take me to bed or lose me forever!”  So maybe I’m not totally soft and sensitive.

The first time I saw Top Gun it was in an ice-cold theatre on a hot summer night in Estevan, Saskatchewan.  Eleven-year-old me was fascinated by it.  I longed for a life of adventure, a life beyond my young and boring existence.  Now I’m thirty-six, with my happy and comfortable life that I love, my life which is largely devoid of adventure.  But when that opening music plays, I long to roll down the windows of the minivan and drive really fast down the highway.  The highway to the danger zone.

And now we are six

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“This is the greatest day of my life!” Jake said this morning.  “I got Finn McMissile toys and I learned how to button up my pants!”  He stood on one foot for a minute and added thoughtfully,  “I don’t really feel older though.  I could still stand like this when I was just five.”