Monthly Archives: March 2012

Just call me Flylady

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I have a confession to make that may make me unpopular or perhaps even shunned from the community.  I’m going to take a deep breath and be out with it.  Here it is, my dirty little secret: my house is always clean, neat, and organized.  Now please stay with me a moment – this is not meant to make anyone feel bad or for me to boast about my superior housekeeping skills.  If THIS is what my life has come down to – boasting about superior housekeeping skills – then I may as well end it all right now.  Just writing superior housekeeping skills in relation to myself makes me want to stab myself and/or curl up in a corner and sob with the grimness of it all.

No, my clean, neat, and organized house is more of a function of a rigid, Type-A personality mixed with an extreme distaste for mess, with a side of minor germophobia.  I have never once left dirty dishes in the sink overnight.  I set out my outfit the night before I wear it, I write down the week’s menu and grocery requirements in my agenda.  The kids put away all their toys every night.  I do laundry every single day and I clean the bathroom three times a week.  If my mother-in-law was to show up on my doorstep unannounced, I would certainly have many emotions but shame about the state of my house would not be one of them.

Believe me, I would like to be less like this.  When I have people over for dinner, it’s all I can do to not jump up and start scraping plates and running hot water as soon as everyone is finished.  I have to make myself drink another glass of wine, just so I can relax and carry on a conversation like a normal person.  Tragic, no?  DRINK MORE WINE TO DULL THE CRAZY INTERNAL CLEANING LADY.

But it’s not like I have the kids’ toys alphabetized and on index cards, and it’s not like I’m making hospital corners when I make the bed.  Esthetically, I like things to be tidy, and so when my friend Hannah mentioned Flylady and sink-shining, I thought I should check it out.  After all, I DID have gross crusty stuff around the kitchen faucet, and there WERE some hard water deposits around the filter, and, to be honest, I kind of coveted her shiny sink (go read that link, and you will see why I love Hannah so much – her shiny shiny monument to her own insanity).  So I went over to Flylady to see what all the fuss was about – Flylady, who has this thirty-one day recipe to get one’s life in order.

Well.

It turns out that I have inadvertently been following the Flylady’s methodology for years.  Apparently I AM A FLYLADY, but without the housekeeping-tips blog.  Although I don’t leave little post-it notes full of positive affirmations around the house.  Who would do that?  If one is attempting to get control over household clutter, why would one clutter one’s house with post-it notes?  I can barely stand looking at my kids’ toys – little post-it notes all over the house proclaiming my awesomeness would be the death of my sanity, for real.  I also do not put on lace-up shoes in the house.  Who wears shoes in the house?  How do you curl up on the couch with shoes on?  Plus I don’t own a pair of lace-up shoes.  Other than that, though, I discovered, somewhat depressingly, that I am an unwitting Flylady.

I don’t feel fly, though.  I thought perhaps that if I had a shiny sink – as recommended by the Flylady as the first step to getting one’s life in order – then I would surely be fly as fly could be.  So I followed all the steps, hot water and bleach, scrubbing with a scouring pad and baking soda, using a toothbrush and a butter knife, then buffing and Windex-ing the whole thing.  I stepped back to survey the job.

Huh.  The sink was shinier, sure, but it wasn’t remarkable.  It wasn’t life-changing or transformative.  I could see my reflection, but in a fuzzy, warped, big-forehead kind of way.  I felt very let down.  FLYLADY FAIL.  For the amount of time and resources involved, I expected much, much better.  Flylady, you have disappointed me.  Or perhaps I have disappointed myself.  I do not feel that my shiny sink is a reflection of the love I have for myself.  I feel that it is a reflection of my own rigidity and craziness. 

But that didn’t stop me, today, from buffing it all over again.

Eight! Eight! Eight is Great!

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Yesterday I was doing some things around the school (putting up posters asking for volunteers to help in the naturalization area.  Do you want to help?  No?  Yeah, neither does anyone else.) when I heard the kindergarten class singing their morning song.  It is a song familiar to me, since I heard Jake singing it all last year.  Hi there neighbour!  What do you say?  It’s going to be a HAPPY DAY.  It proceeded to wedge itself into my brain, supplanting Pinball Wizard (That deaf dumb blind kid sure plays a mean pinball!).
When my alarm went off this morning, I thought “It’s going to be a HAPPY DAY”, because not only is it my tenth anniversary – I did not receive any tin foil, sadly, but my husband did present me with a bouquet of my favourite Gerber daisies – but it is also Mark’s eighth birthday!  Nothing says romance like going into labour and delivery on your second wedding anniversary after being on bedrest for three weeks with pre-eclampsia and checking your own urine for protein twice a day! 
But it is a special and happy day in our house.  I have made a big gooey chocolate layer cake, there is the promise of TAKE OUT PIZZA tonight, and a nice bottle of red with my name on it.  Figuratively speaking.  The wine is not actually named Nicole.
Happy Birthday Mark!

The Tin Anniversary

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I don’t know if you remember what the weather was like nine years and three hundred and sixty three days ago, but I do, perfectly.  For a month it had been minus thirty and snowing, but suddenly the temperature turned warm and mild.  It was a beautiful day in Banff, and I was walking around with a sleeveless dress on:

To tell the truth, I was kind of freezing.  Then the wind came up, a little:

That was ten years ago, on this coming Friday!  That is a long time.  I looked up the traditional gift for a ten-year anniversary and discovered that it is TIN.  Can’t wait for my tin foil.  Maybe I will festively open up a can of chickpeas – or maybe not, since that seems to be typical of any Friday. 

I love being married to my husband and I did have a beautiful wedding, marred only by a slight breakdown ten years ago TODAY when I broke a nail and my esthetician at the time was not versed in acrylic nails.  What kind of esthetician is not versed in acrylic nails, you may ask?  I don’t know, but I cried hysterically.  My soon-to-be-husband tried to calm me down by a) pointing out that I was going to be wearing gloves, anyway, and b) calling his best man, who was married to an esthetician who promised to handle any subsequent nail emergencies.  I did get the nail fixed, thank god, because the hysteria from my single broken nail was threatening to overshadow the whole day. 

It’s funny that I would be that upset about a NAIL, because I was the opposite of a Bridezilla.  In fact, I may have been a different kind of Bridezilla, because I really didn’t care about most of the proceedings.  My poor mother was beside herself because I wouldn’t choose centrepieces for the tables.  I shruggingly said she could choose what she liked, which sent her into a spiral of centrepiece obsession.  My sister-in-law, in what can only be described as an act of incredible generosity and kindness, actually sat down with my mother and made centrepieces. 

But I was operating on the idea that there are only three things that people remember from any given wedding: what the bride looked like, if the food was decent, and if there was good music or if there were a plethora of boring speeches.  I prayed for no weird breakouts, I chose a crowd-pleasing meal that I did not actually consume but I heard it was tasty, and our DJ rocked it out with such hits as Old Time Rock and Roll and YMCA. 

We only had the bare minimum of speeches; my feelings then as now were that wedding speeches generally fall into one of two categories: the overly emotional (“Take care of my little girl!”) or the incredibly inappropriate (“So then he got totally hammered and streaked across the field, and then puked all over everyone, and she still married the guy!  Even after she found out the size of his dick!”).  Sometimes, unfortunately, speeches can belong to BOTH categories, which is terrible for the listener.  I was once at a wedding where there was an open mike, and guests were encouraged to share anecdotes about the bride and groom.  This is a very bad idea.  This is especially a bad idea when booze is involved and ex-boyfriends of the bride have been invited.  That is all I’m going to say.

But ten years of marriage!  In the spirit of the day, here are ten things I love about my husband:

1) He’s a great husband, and he allows me to live my life of luxurious housewifery.
2) He’s a really good father, even if he does allow the children to be flatulent at the dinner table.
3) He’s really hot.
4) He doesn’t like when I cry so he eats anything I make for dinner.
5) He would never forget my birthday, and always is incredibly thoughtful when purchasing gifts.
6) He loves to plan vacations, and so all I have to do is sit back and enjoy while he handles the logistics.
7) He is trying to teach me to be less directionally-impaired, so I don’t have to pull over to the road to sob because I’m lost. 
8) He shares my stupid frat-boy sense of humour, and always knows exactly what I mean when I say we’re having a “pretty nice little Saturday“.
9) He’s reliable, trust-worthy, confident, and smart.  He is so confident, he corrected me when I wrote about the ten sexiest men and FORGOT JOHN CUSACK.  It takes a big man to do that.
10) He makes me happy with myself.

Happy Anniversary, shmoopie.

Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

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As we pulled out of the parking lot at the gymnastics centre, with my frayed nerves and cupcake-stained children, I silently vowed never to host another large children’s birthday party ever again.  Truly, I think we are now past the age where I can allow my kids to invite fourteen children and still expect to emerge from the party with my sanity still intact.  A group of fifteen kindergarteners, or fifteen first graders even, is much, much easier to deal with than a group of fifteen children ranging in ages from six to nine.  Apparently I don’t like children as much as I thought I did.  I stood impotently among the chaos of the party room, as sugar-addled children chased each other around the table, arms flailing, screaming at the very top of their lungs.  I was powerless to stop it.  At one point it felt like the room was vibrating.  One little girl sat on a chair, with her hands over her ears.  I gave her a goody bag, and announced that anyone who was as calm as she was would also receive a goody bag.  Eventually things settled down and parents arrived, only a few arriving after the specified pick-up time.  As God is my witness, I will never host another such birthday party again.

I am currently reading Anna Karenina, and I came across the following paragraph:

Between the Countess Nordston and Levin relations had
grown up such as are not infrequently met with in
Society, when two people outwardly remaining in friendly
relations despise each other to such an extent that
they cannot treat each other seriously, or even be offended with one another.
It occurred to me that this is the nineteenth-century Russian equivalent of passive-aggressiveness.  Oh, passive-aggressiveness, the ugliest of all negative character traits.  I feel this way, truly, but I find that I myself have taken on a very passive-aggressive attitude while shopping.
It’s the thing now for all stores, it seems, to ask for your email address every time a purchase is made, and that is something that threatens the remaining vestiges of my sanity.  My in-box is filled, constantly, with enthusiastically-worded newsletters from various corporations about there only being three! days! left! of whatever fabulous sale is going on right! now!  In a bid to control some of this raging-out-of-control in-box, I unsubscribed to all newsletters but am now in an awkward position whenever I am shopping.  At first, I tried a polite-but-firm tone with the salesperson, that no, I did not wish to leave my email address.  However, my polite-but-firm tone was overruled by the salesperson’s pleas, promises of good deals, and apparent need for demographic information; how that is obtained via email is beyond me but nevertheless I felt powerless to refuse.  I felt sorry for the salesperson who is just fulfilling their job requirements by asking customers for their emails.  And yet, I want no more emails. 
My solution to this problem is to give a false email address.  I feel a little skeevy about this practice, but yet, I have no better solution.  So I normally give a gmail address, usually with some variation of Nicole.  But then I started guiltily thinking about all the Nicoles on gmail who are, without their knowledge, being placed on various mailing lists.  I could just imagine some other Nicole opening up her in-box, thinking What the fuck, Old Navy?  I JUST unsubscribed from you!  Again!
I don’t know what to do.  Perhaps the next time I will use such monikers as onehotmama at hotmail, or babelicious at yahoo or maybe even milf at gmail.  Do you think they’ll be able to see through my ruse?

Up The Irish

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Today, in addition to making three dozen cupcakes and a loaf of banana bread, I am going to try my hand at Irish Soda Bread, in the festive spirit of the day.  I am also making kale chips and roasted asparagus, which count as festively Irish because of the green colour.  I am in general not a fan of potato dishes, so green veggies and soda bread is about as far as I go in the St. Paddy’s department.  I don’t even wear green, which is due to the fact that my wardrobe is almost exclusively grey and black.  This brings me to another point: it’s all the rage these days to wear a certain colour on a certain day to show support for various causes (purple for gay rights, pink for anti-bullying, etc.) and I’m sorry to say I almost never partake.  It’s not that I don’t support those causes – I am all for gay rights and anti-bullying, of course – but I don’t actually have the appropriate clothes.  So here’s what I’m wearing on St. Paddy’s Day:

Festive Irish wear – complete with fluffy dog!  This is also week four of my “growing out my goddamn hair” and I’m feeling pleased with it.  It’s growing!  Hair grows!  Regretsy no more!
It has been a very, very shitty week in the Boyhouse, but I am TIRED of being a little black cloud of sadness.  Last night I drugged myself and slept ten hours, and today I am filled with optimism! and cheer! and so instead I am going to transform myself into my usual ray of sunshine and tell you all the happy things about this week, as well as a few things I find cheering. 
1. Mark’s birthday party is tomorrow and of the fourteen children invited, thirteen of them RSVP’d by the date specified on the invitation.  This is surely a new record.  I’m taking an extra goody bag just in case but hooray for people adhering to basic societal expectations!
2. The boys’ class put on a play about the history of Calgary, and Jake was genius – GENIUS, I SAY – as Inspector Brisbois, head of the Northwest Mounted Police and builder of Fort Calgary.  He even wore a handlebar moustache.  Perhaps he is a future Movember participant? 
3. Report cards came out yesterday, and much to my surprise, Mark is apparently gifted at thermometer reading.  Several sentences were devoted to Mark and his ability to accurately read a thermometer.  He is the go-to person when classmates have questions about temperatures. 
4. This makes me laugh every time I look at it:
Although the other explanation is “rich” and/or “titled”.
5. I found this picture of Barkley when we first got him:
CUTE!!!  Wook at his widdle face.
And…that’s it.  I have been in a bit of a funk, so I would love, love, love it if you told me some cheering/happy things going on in your life.  xo

Math Geeks and Pi Day and Blowing Things Up

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It’s Pi Day, the day that math geeks everywhere celebrate the ability to measure properties of a circle.  Hooray for Pi Day!  I don’t mean to boast, but I am awesome at math.  Oh sure, I would be a little rusty these days, but back in the day I rocked the calculus world.  I remember taking my very first calculus class and knowing at the onset that I loved it and knew what I wanted to do with my life – which at the time had nothing to do with the housewife lifestyle that I now live – and after that, I concentrated on math and economics and statistics.  I worked in a male-dominated field in a male-dominated company; I was the sole woman in my work group, and in the larger group, I had few female colleagues.  I mention this because stereotypically, women tend not to pursue careers in the fields of math and science, although this is changing, slowly. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about gender roles and stereotypes lately.  It’s been the buzz all over the internet, ever since Lego came out with their Friends line.  As an aside, had the Friends line been available when I was a child, I would have been all over it.  Which brings me to my next point: although I am a math geek and although I spent my career creating models and running mathematical simulations and loving every minute of it, I am also very feminine.  I wear makeup, scented lotion, and jewelry every day.  I spend a lot of time thinking about clothes and my hair.  When I was a child, my clothes were not all pink – because back then, you wore what your mother said you were going to wear, and there were much fewer choices in the clothing department – but I wished they were.  My room was painted pink, my bedspread was pink, and my favourite toy was a dollhouse.  So.  Does my being a girly-girl preclude my being a math geek?  Of course not.

My boys’ toy preferences and interests were apparent from a very young age.  I was distraught that my nine month old son would fuss in his stroller when I wanted to take him for long walks, until I realized that he would be happy in his stroller when I walked alongside busy streets.  Watching the buses, cars, and trucks was enough to make him happy.  At age two, he could name all the major car manufacturers; when we walked past a vehicle he could identify the make and model.  A friend suggested the “Mighty Machines” videos, and my two sons would watch them over and over again.

My youngest son’s favourite “Mighty Machine” video was one about a demolition site.  His favourite game was re-enacting a demolition site, and his chubby, angelic-looking toddler self would build up piles of blocks and toys merely to knock it all down.  When he and his brother were 2 and 3, they would play dinosaurs.  The dinosaurs were not friends.  They killed each other.  They fought each other.  They would unite against the bad dinosaurs and there would be much carnage.  And later, I would see the two boys snuggled together on the couch, my younger son’s head resting on my older son’s shoulder, and they would ask to watch “Mighty Machines”.

The boys are now six and a half and almost eight.  The games they play almost always involve a battle of some kind, something blowing up, death, and destruction.  In discussing boys and their games, my friend Beck articulated something that I had been struggling to put into words; she said that a lot of traditional male play has to do with safely channeling male aggression, and that it also has to do with little boys grappling with the ideas of justice and helping the innocent.  This struck exactly the right note with me.  I once was having a friendly discussion with another mom, and when I joked about my children and their fascination with blowing things up, she told me to watch out, lest I have a “Columbine situation” on my hands.  You can imagine how that made me feel.

I recently read an article in which the author complained about her daughter and her love for pink clothing and princess accessories.  She had encouraged her sons to wear pink and play with dolls, but she disliked her daughter taking part in the same type of play.  She was, she said, more comfortable when her children challenged gender norms than when they conformed to them.  This upset me in a way I could not articulate, and I still can’t, really.  I cannot imagine how I would have felt, as a child, if the only play available to me was of a “male” variety, or even of a gender neutral one. 

My children play games that would seem to be violent.  They don’t have dolls and they don’t wear pink.  They have friends who are girls.  After school, in the playground, they play games where they spy on the bad guys and then shoot them.  They love stuffed animals.  The bad guys get body parts chopped off in their games.  They turn off the TV when a sad story comes on the news.  This morning they saw an itinerant bottle-picker digging through the recycling in our alley, and when I explained what he was doing, Mark teared up and Jake looked worried, at the thought of someone with no job and no home going through other people’s trash for money.

My boys are compassionate, empathetic, and kind AND they are attracted to violent games and toys.  This does not make them violent.  They know the difference between a game and real life.  When we attempt to force children into a particular role, when we insist that boys have dolls and girls have trucks, we do them a disservice.  The world has room for everyone: tomboy girls and boys who play Barbies, as well as girly-girls and boys who stab each other with pretend light sabres, and everything in between.  Children are not what they play with or wear, just as my penchant for pretty things does not take away from my ability to solve an equation.

If the icy sidewalks don’t kill the elderly, I will.

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I am in a mood.  A MOOD, people.  It’s a good thing I am not armed, or have violent tendencies.  And lest we think that this is Daylight Savings Time related, it actually isn’t.  Wait, did you just correct me to say that it’s Daylight SAVING Time, not SAVINGS?  Well, prepare to be stabbed. 

I do hate to generalize a whole group of people, because I’m sure that somewhere out there is a senior citizen who actually is not completely befuddled by the U-Scan at the grocery store, and maybe there is even a retired person who does not complain when there is only one till open at said grocery store, but let me tell you, they do not live in my neighbourhood.  Or, if they do live in my neighbourhood, they don’t shop when I do.

I will say that I have all the time in the world for the teeny little octogenarian who is shaking as she counts out her change to buy her All-Bran and pound of butter.  That may be me one day.  I’m okay with that.  I’m also okay with helping the exeedingly confused old man find where the potatoes are located.  What I am not okay with is the new brand of seniors, the ones who are in their sixties and seventies and who are assholes, swimming in entitlement and without much to keep them occupied.

I wasn’t in the greatest mood while shopping anyway, since at the onset I had a very strange conversation at the strawberry display with regards to the on-sale, but non-organic strawberries in my cart.  I buy a lot of organic produce, but I buy non-organic as well.  I am at peace with what I feed myself and my children, but we live in a society, people.  If something seems offensive coming out of your mouth, then possibly it should be left unsaid.

Anyway, I lined up at the one till that was open, with my cart full of my usual weekly groceries, including organic and regular produce.  There were two people in front of me: a man and a woman, both in their late sixties, I would guess.  A couple – also in their sixties – came up behind me, and, seeing that there were OMG THREE PEOPLE in front of them, they shouted at the cashier.  Is there anyone else working here? they asked.  Upon hearing that the other cashier was on break, all hell broke loose.  First, the couple behind me huffily insisted that they would go to the U-Scan.  Even from my vantage point, I could hear the U-Scan clerk’s frustration at helping them.  No, don’t scan that item.  Put in the PLU code.  No, the first button.  THE FIRST BUTTON.  You need to put your items in the bag.  IN THE BAG.  NO, DON’T SCAN IT AGAIN.  They were still there, attempting to scan their own items when I left the store.  Karma, bitches. 

The second thing that happened when the admittedly slow-moving cashier (whose name is – I kid you not – Adrift) said that the other cashier was on break was that the people in front of me, evidently strangers, started bonding in the way of prisoners everywhere, united against the man.  Oh, the woman said, raising her eyebrows, things certainly have changed.  Times certainly have changed since our day, haven’t they.  The man agreed with her.  This man had only a flat of bottled water, and he said snappishly to the carryout woman – who is herself a senior, but evidently not able to afford to retire since she is working as a carryout at the grocery store – that he needed four more flats of water.  Could she run and fetch them for him?  He could only carry one flat at a time.  THAT’S WHAT CARTS ARE FOR, MOTHERFUCKER.  It occurred to me to say that but I pride myself on practicing patience and compassion, and so I stood their with my ujaiji breathing, focusing on the “Best and Worst Beach Bodies!” magazine in front of me. 

Well, once the carryout woman went to fetch the four flats of water for this overly-entitled man, he and the woman took up complaining again, keeping with the “times have changed” theme.  We didn’t even get a break! the woman said.  You know who else never got a break?  Children working in the Cape Breton coal mines.  Were you one of them?  No?  Then shut the fuck up.  Inhale, exhale.  Inhale peace, exhale happiness.

Well, they sure don’t make it convenient, do they? the man commisserated as the old carryout woman came back with a cartful of flats of water, for this dreadfully inconvenienced man.  And that, dear reader, is when I snapped.  I just couldn’t hear any more.  I have had it with seniors complaining about waiting in line at the grocery store.  I have been pushed far enough.  It’s nine thirty on a Monday morning – what else could you possibly have to do?  Do you need to rush home to watch The Price Is Right?  Maybe you could complain that Bob Barker isn’t on there anymore, or that your favourite soap opera was cancelled.  Maybe you have a busy day of calling in complaints to the city about your neighbours.  I don’t know.  All I know was I could no longer be silent. 

I cleared my throat, and said, very slowly and clearly, Everyone is in a hurry.  But really, what are we in a hurry for?  Five minutes here or there isn’t really going to affect anything, is it?  Is it REALLY?  Then I looked them right in their beady, old eyes, with my eyebrows raised into my hairline and a slightly psychotic smile on my face.  I stared them down; I did.  They both quietly looked away.  Giving someone the “furry eyebrow”, as my children would tell you, works.

I pushed my cart full of bagged groceries past the poor U-Scan clerk still helping the couple figure out how to type in the code for bananas, past a man who clearly should not still have a driver’s license parking his boat of a car in the handicapped space, past a woman who was shaking her head over the courtesy parking for pregnant women (In my day we certainly didn’t get special treatment just for expecting a baby!).  I think the “furry eyebrow” may now be a permanent part of my face.  I had better smile, quickly, lest my face freezes like this.