Monthly Archives: June 2012

69 Days of Summer Vacation; Mark and Jake Are Going To Do It All!

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I was going to do a “Wordless Wednesday” and just post this picture of my kids on their last day of Grade One and Two:
But there is a reason I don’t do Wordless Wednesdays, and that is because I am much, much too wordy.  I want to tell you all about the last day of school and how I held my friend’s four week old baby boy today, and he was all curled up like a little bean on my shoulder and he fell asleep, and now my boys are all huge (see above picture for relative hugeness) and pretending to be hip-hop artists, apparently, and how sad I am that their favourite teacher is leaving the school and so Jake won’t be in her class next year, and how she whispered “I love you, Jake” when we were leaving, and how she described Jake as blossoming from a shy little boy in September to one of the leaders and role models of the class, and how happy she was to have Mark in her class for two years, and how she described Mark as having a huge love of learning, and how I came home and while thinking about fleeting time I missed a step going up the stairs and slammed my bare foot on the edge of the step and now it’s all swollen and bruised and how I’ve been home for two hours and still haven’t accomplished any of the tasks I set out to do, and how I’m wondering if a beer would solve these problems.
It might.
So I’m not going to think about my empty nest eleven years hence, but instead I am going to relate snippets of life around me over the past couple of weeks.
Overheard at the mall:
Girl #1: I think I’m going to stop dyeing my hair.  The roots are coming in too light.
Girl #2: What’s your natural colour, anyway?
Girl #1: Like, ash blonde?
Girl #2: WHAT DID YOU SAY?
Girl #1: Ash blonde?
Girl #2: Oh my god.  Ash blonde?  Your natural colour is ASH BLONDE?  Why in the world would you EVER colour ASH BLONDE?
Girl #1: I didn’t think it was that exciting.
Seen while driving: a billboard proclaiming “Look your Stampede best!  With BOTOX.”

Conversation between the kids, after watching Empire Strikes Back:
Mark: Mom, I thought you said that Princess Leia and Han Solo were in love.
Me: Yes.
Mark: They totally do not seem like they are in love.  They just bug each other all the time.
Jake: Mark!  That means they are going to get married.  Sometimes your wife is just a pain in the butt all the time!
Me: Jake!  Why would you say that.
Jake: No, Mom, it’s true!  That’s what being married IS. 
Me: I’m not a pain in the butt to your dad.
Jake: I didn’t mean you, Mom.  Sometimes it’s Dad who is the pain in the butt.
Conversation at my dinner table:
Husband: You look really nice today.
Me: Thanks.
Husband: No, I mean it.  You look great.  That shirt is great.  You should wear it more often.
Me: Thanks!
Husband: It’s so nice to see you in something colourful.
Me: This shirt is navy.
Husband: Yes, but it’s not black.

It’s Coming From Inside The House!

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How was your weekend?  Normally my weekends are fairly uneventful, but this weekend was the exception to the rule.  A while back, the CBC was having a fundraiser for the Calgary Food Bank, and my girlfriends and I managed to purchase an evening with local celebrity and food goddess extraordinaire Julie van Rosendaal, from Dinner with Julie!  Squee!  It was so much fun.  There’s nothing like drinking wine and hanging with the girls, am I right?  The thing is, it never really happens much.  Friday nights normally see me in my pajamas, drinking wine on the couch – and during the golf season, often that means I’m drinking wine on the couch by myself, watching NYPD Blue, which is a teensy bit depressing once I see that written down.  So, it was so much fun – we all dressed up a little bit, and I think we probably startled Julie with our zeal (WE LOVE YOU, JULIEEEEEE!).  Although, my girlfriend who hosted mentioned to me this morning that she could see me visibly fade after nine o’clock, and I was the first person to mention that it was now time to go home.  Could she blame me?  By ten o’clock I had been up for over seventeen hours, and after a few glasses of wine…zzzzzz….

Saturday dawned grey and rainy; of course – it was Super Soccer Saturday!  There’s nothing quite like having a soccer tournament in the pouring rain.  Fortunately the rain tapered to a drizzle and eventually let up.  Unfortunately the field in places was just completely sodden.  The kids had fun, I had enough layers and rain wear on that I didn’t freeze, and my life as a soccer mom is now over, so happiness all around.

How can you resist such a face?  He is also my hero of the day, and here’s the story.  First, I need you to understand, dear reader, that a phobia is a phobia.  Some of us have fears that may or may not have grounding in reality.  They may seem unreasonable or silly to others, but they are very real to the phobic person.  I have a phobia of moths.
They are such freaky things, and they flutter so spastically.  I am TERRIFIED of them, and as far as I can tell they do nothing of particular merit in the insect world.  They are just gross and ugly and I hate them the end.  Anyway, since we have been having work done on the house, the doors are frequently left open, and on Saturday afternoon I was calmly cleaning up the kitchen from lunch and a MOTH FLUTTERED RIGHT IN MY FACE AND THEN FLUTTERED AROUND THE SINK.  I don’t know what you would do in that situation, but what I did was scream my husband’s name over and over at the top of my lungs.  His lack of response then spurred me to run down the stairs, where the kids were very calmly playing and were disturbingly not at all bothered by my hysterical screaming.  “Where’s your dad where’s your DAD?” I shrieked, not waiting for them to answer before I burst into the bathroom where he was showering, effectively putting him into cardiac arrest.  By the time he dried off (slowly) and made his way upstairs, the moth was nowhere to be found.
The only thing worse than having a moth in the house is not knowing the whereabouts of said moth.
“It could be anywhere!” I whispered to my husband, as he walked from room to room, looking.  The moth was nowhere to be found.  A guy was actually working on our bathroom at the time, a huge and quiet guy referred to universally as “D”.  My husband explained the situation to the somewhat bewildered fellow, who reassured me that he hadn’t seen a moth, but if he did, he would squish it immediately.  After a while, my husband gave up the search, although I continued to creep suspiciously from room to room.  “It must have made its way outside!” he said cheerfully, although I thought, darkly, that he was saying this to placate me. 
This morning the moth showed up.  It must have hidden under the food processor.  I moved it out of the way to plug in the blender this morning, when the moth made its appearance.  I was making a smoothie for Mark’s breakfast, and he was fairly alarmed when I started screaming.  I took a deep breath, told him I needed him to be really brave, and to get the moth.  He grabbed a tissue, ran to the window where the moth was fluttering, and squished it!  My brave, big boy! 
And here I was, fretting at the speed at which children grow up.  There’s nothing quite so satisfying as having a big kid who can squish moths for me.   

Cheese is my boyfriend, but we’re breaking up.

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“I think you actually are under a lot of stress,” my friend said to me the other day, “But you just don’t want to complain about it because it’s princess-stress.”  Exactly.

Last night, Jake had a screaming nightmare, and I don’t know what you do when your kids wake you up in the middle of the night with a blood curdling scream, but my instinct is to jump out of bed and run to their bedrooms.  Unfortunately, I have low blood pressure and often get dizzy if I get up too fast from sitting, so you can imagine what might happen if I am awakened at three in the morning from a dead sleep and start running down the hallway.  I dizzily fell heavily into the doorframe, somehow simultaneously bruising my right shoulder and my left wrist.  It was not a particularly good start to the day, which included a trip to the dentist, yet another phone call about summer swim lessons, and no cheese.

If I was to name one single favourite food, it would just be cheese, as an all-encompassing description.  I love cheese.  I love dairy products.  However, as I age – Hello, I AM older than Mrs. Robinson! – I am realizing more and more that our amorous relationship is one-sided.  Dairy, it seems, does not love me back.  I have been thinking about this for months but have been in semi-denial, continuing to consume my 5-6 dairy servings a day. 

Here lies the problem.

I am biting the proverbial bullet and cutting down on my dairy consumption; although, as my friend said, if I cut down to ONE serving a day it would be a huge reduction, I am trying to cut down to only a few servings per week.  Like the day I decided that I would no longer have a daily glass (or two) of wine, but instead only drink wine on weekends (and moon days, I’m only human), I have decided that I will cut back to only what I consider the bare necessities of dairy consumption: feta, goat cheese, and Parmesan a couple times a week.  The thought of no dairy ever again has filled me with far too much angst and sadness; I’m hoping by restricting my intake I will be able to savour and love the things I love most when I have them.  When I curtailed my wine consumption, I found that I enjoyed it more when I had it; I looked FORWARD to Friday so I could have some of that nectar of the gods.  (When is it Friday, again?  Tomorrow?  YAY.)

So I guess we haven’t really broken up.  It’s more like dairy and I are casual fuck-buddies, rather than the committed marriage we used to be in.

However, I think I’m in mourning.  Yesterday I looked tearfully in the fridge at lunchtime, thinking that all the joy in eating is now GONE.  I look forward to my lunch every day, like this little noontime beam of light, and every single day I have the exact same lunch: veggie wraps with cheese, berries with yogurt.  NO CHEESE NO YOGURT MAKES NICOLE A SAD GIRL.  Today I rallied, though.  I dug out my nutritional yeast and made a spreadable cheese that made me feel like a bit of a douchebag, but it actually was not at all bad.  It was kind of tasty, actually.

So I have a question for you: have you ever had to cut a food out of your life that you loved?  When I went fully vegetarian it was not a hardship at all; I barely ate meat for many years and I didn’t enjoy it when I did eat it.  THIS, however, feels like a sad hardship, even if it IS a princess problem.  I mean, I’m reading a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder right now, and I’m reading On The Banks of Plum Creek to the boys, so hardship is a very relative term.  (THE GRASSHOPPERS ARE COMING, PA.  DON’T BUY THE HOUSE ON CREDIT.  YOU WILL NEVER MAKE A WHEAT CROP, EVER.)  I mean, I’m discovering that coconut milk is not bad on cereal, and berries without yogurt are still delicious, and even though it’s only been two days I’m feeling pretty great.  But still. 

I miss you, baby.  Can we schedule a booty call for later this week?

Adventures in Shopping

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So far, it has been a very strange day.  I will say that, although I am very happy at the hard working contractors and their willingness to put in extra time to get the job done (GIT ER DUN), I am starting to get very TIRED of having people in the house all the time.  The noise level is high, no matter what task they are accomplishing.  Between the tile saw, regular saws, Shop Vac, hammers, floor scraper or what-have-you, and the near-constant LOUD VOICES USING THE OPPOSITE OF POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT, the noise is getting to me.  For two days, a tiler was here, and he whistled the entire time.  THE ENTIRE TIME.  He whistled little off-tune songs, and it just kept going.  Finally I thought I would turn on some music in an attempt to drown out the whistling.  This turned out to be a mistake of epic proportions.  The tiler proceeded to whistle along to the music, but NOT WELL.  By the time my husband got home from work on Friday I had already had worked my way through the beers in the fridge and was frantically opening a bottle of wine.  Then – THEN – the tiler showed up to work before eight o’clock on Saturday morning, while I was still in the shower.  Fortunately my husband was home but the tiler saw me in my robe, which is always an awkward situation.  A friend thought maybe I could write about it a la 50 Shades of Tiling but NO. 

I’m going a bit crazy here.

In any event, I have been tasked with the choosing of a mirror, light fixture, and various towel rack implements.  My job, as given to me by the head contractor, was to go to Home Depot and choose all these things, write down the SKU numbers, and then report back in order for him to purchase them.  It seems a little, I don’t know, could we cut out the middle man here, but yet I am an obedient renovator and so I do as I am told.  I headed to the Home Depot this morning – after a routinely unpleasant, but not excessively so, trip to Walmart – and I will say this: there are no adjectives to adequately express how poorly equipped I am for a solo trip to Home Depot.  For one thing, I am only recently able to go to Costco on my own without heart-pounding anxiety that I am going to die from crushing by falling warehouse objects.  For another thing, I am easily overwhelmed.  Trips to places like Bed, Bath and Beyond, for me, start off with the simple need for a toothbrush holder, and end up with me wondering if I need a three-tiered shoe rack or a Jelly Belly ice shaver/syrup set; then I get so overwhelmed by the choices and massive amount of landfill-destined items that I leave empty handed, and still in need of a toothbrush holder. 

In any case, I headed to Home Depot, assuming a confidence that I didn’t feel, and I found the department that had the bathroom fixtures.  I immediately phoned my husband at work, near tears, saying I didn’t know how I could possibly choose a mirror.  I started to unravel, like if I chose the wrong mirror the consquences would be dire indeed: the entire renovation would be for naught, all our money and time will have been wasted, and we may as well have kept our mouldy old bathroom.  He talked me off of the mirror-choosing ledge (“Sweetie, I’m going into a meeting.  Can we talk about this later?”) and then I proceeded to raise the suspicions of many, many Home Depot employees by walking around shakily photographing things on my iPhone and making notes of the SKU numbers.  “Can I HELP you?” the orange-aproned people kept asking me, to which I responded, cheerfully “No thanks!”.  They probably thought I was one of those secret shoppers, or maybe a spy from Lowe’s. 

To add to the strangeness of this day, I brought the boys home for lunch and Jake scarfed down a sandwich, a glass of milk, and then requested half of a Caramilk bar that he had been saving.  Sure!  Why not!  After he scarfed that down and I was driving them back to school, Jake mentioned, casually, that he was going to barf.  The bees are doing what now?  I pulled over and let Jake out, when he barfed in the gutter like a miniature drunk.  Meanwhile, Mark kept asking, “Are you almost done barfing?  I don’t want to be late for school.”  Points for punctuality, although maybe not for empathy.  Although I knew he wasn’t sick, he had just eaten too quickly, I of course wasn’t going to send my just-barfed kid back to school.  So I dropped Mark off after extracting promises that he would pick up Jake’s backpack and spelling homework, and took my now-fine kid home.  Even though I had plans to pick up milk and fruit, and I still needed a goddamn toothbrush holder.

I settled Jake on the couch with a blanket and the “Quackbusters” movie, when the head contractor came to talk to me.  He told me, very seriously, that they had finally removed the toilet from the upstairs bathroom and now all the contractors would have to use the downstairs bathroom.  Which is fine, of course, except that things are a little awkward when I am working on the computer and not twenty feet away from me someone is having a bowel movement.  And doesn’t use the fan.  Which is what just happened.

I’m just saying, this has been a very strange day.  And it’s only 2:30!  I can’t wait to see what the dinner hour brings. 

I think I’m a Winter

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I’m starting to talk like our contractors.  My husband asked me, casually, what the tile guys were going to do with the cement shower base and cinderblock bench.  “They’re gonna beef it up real good” was what I actually told him.  Because I now know ALL when it comes to pouring the cement for a shower base.  Also, if ever I am in a tiling situation where I am instructing someone, I know that the proper way to ask someone to affix a tile onto a surface is to say “Butter it up, slap that fucker on.  COME ON!  Shim it up a bit!  Fuck!  Let’s go!”

I was just out driving in an electrical storm, which is always a bit freaky, although they say a car is the safest place to be.  I don’t know, I think I prefer to be in the comfort of my own home, but maybe that’s just the irrational, “hail is pelting my windshield and it’s scaring me” part of my brain talking.  Speaking of irrational, when I went to pick the boys up for lunch, Mark came out with no jacket.  In the rain.  When asked about it, he said he didn’t think he needed it.  By the time I had to take them back to the school, the rain had upgraded from “raining a little” to “torrential downpour plus hail” and yet Mark still refused a jacket.  To be honest, I was just as glad because sending a child to school with two jackets is a recipe for one of those jackets to be destined for the lost and found.  “Run fast!” I told him as I dropped him off, hoping he wouldn’t be totally soaked for the rest of the day.

Yesterday was a beautiful, warm day, and this is noteworthy since it was a Tuesday, and, therefore, a soccer practice.  A warm day for soccer?  It’s bringing up the average temperature!  Meteorologists across the city were probably rubbing their lying hands with glee.  In any case, I was just as happy to be sitting in the sun.  Or, as it turned out, playing soccer in the sun.

The coach approached me a couple of days ago to ask me to help out on the field at last night’s practice.  He specifically requested that I, maybe, could wear sneakers?  We both looked at my feet when he said that.  I was wearing three inch wedges – in the playground, ridiculously enough.  What is wrong with me?  Anyway, I told him I most certainly would help on the field, and I did not mention the fact that despite owning many, many pairs of black shoes, I do not own a single pair of sneakers.  What?  I’m not a runner, nor do I ever frequent the gym, so…I pulled out my one pair of sensible shoes – Mary Jane-style Skechers that I wear when I work in the garden.  They worked for the purpose, anyway, although the “parents versus kids” game that I was supposedly participating in morphed into an “older siblings who want to annihilate their younger siblings versus kids” game, which, quite frankly, sucked.  I don’t usually complain about other mothers, and I try not to judge, but there is one mom on the team who brings her ten year old son to watch the practices and games, and whom she very obviously favours over her younger son (who is on the team).  I’m not a big FAN of favouritism, like most of us, but when she happily sat by as her older son effectively kept the ball away from the younger players, WHOSE PRACTICE IT WAS, well, Judgy McJudgerton.  Yes, your ten year old son is awesome compared to the U8 team.  Praise Jesus.

I am not – obviously – a fashion blogger, nor do I read any fashion blogs, but I do love when people write about clothing, shoes, bags, etc.  So I was kind of excited to read Swistle’s post about all her clothing essentially being the same three colours.  I was excited because my wardrobe is, as you may or may not know, almost exclusively black or grey.  It’s not just me, lots of people have a predominant colour palette in their wardrobe!  Remember how everyone used to get their colours “done” and would only wear colours in their “season”?  It occurs to me that maybe we are all subconsciously doing just that, without actually getting our colours “done”. 

The book is a little misleading though.  THIRTY special colours? 

Not to be an idiot, but I would have to think very hard to come up with thirty colours, unless I lamely did something like light blue, medium blue, dark blue, etc.  I most assuredly do not have thirty colours of anything in my wardrobe. 

So tell me, what’s in your wardrobe?  Do you find you buy your clothes in similar colours, or are you a veritable Rainbow Brite?

 

I has a sad

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Have you ever had one of those days where you are sad, but not for a particularly valid reason, and that lack of a valid reason makes you even more sad?  That was me today.  As I swept up the dust, again, I started to feel limp and wrung-out, with the thought of excessive noise and dust and general chaos for another week.  Looking outside, I could see trees bending sideways from the gale force winds, I could see the container of heat and drought loving flowers that I planted in the hot and dry corner of my yard, the flowers that are now dead because they have DROWNED from the pouring rain, I could see the grey, grey sky.  I had my usual annual impotent rage about the local meterologists claiming that the average daytime temperature for this time of year is twenty degrees, to which I say SHOW ME THE DATA USED TO CALCULATE THIS.  THIS CANNOT BE TRUE. 

So I was feeling sad, but ridiculously so.  I mean, poor princess: your lovely house is being renovated to be even more lovely and it’s a little bit messy in the meantime.  Poor princess: it’s a little chilly today, not that you need to be outside for any reason.  Poor princess: three little plants you bought died, which you can replace as soon as it stops raining.  Poor princess: you don’t have weather data to calculate the average temperature so that you could win an imaginary argument with the weatherman on TV. 

Wah, wah, wah.  I berated myself for feeling sad, but that didn’t help very much.  Yelling STOP BEING SAD!  STOP IT RIGHT NOW! at yourself is actually very ineffective. 

Eventually I did emerge from under my little black cloud, but only after such cheering activities such as changing the sheets, spraying down and wiping all the cupboards, going grocery shopping, and making a soba noodle salad with miso dressing.  Why would that help?  Because I cannot think of the word “miso” without thinking of The 40 Year Old Virgin “Me so horny, me so horny, me so STUPID!”  And this very lame line, I am somewhat ashamed to say, made me smile every time I thought about it.  It’s not even funny!  And yet. 

Adding somewhat to my bluesy feelings was the fact that I have had Moves Like Jagger going through my head, incessantly, since Friday morning.  Friday was our school’s annual year-end Stampede Breakfast (for those of you not familiar with the Calgary Stampede, a Stampede Breakfast is a pancake breakfast with cowboy hats).  The DJ played mostly top 40 songs for the kids, and my own kids got their groove on for ninety solid minutes.  They do indeed have moves like Jagger, in that they flap their arms and move their bodies a bit jerkily.  They loved it, but since that song – along with Party Rockers in the House Tonight and You Don’t Know You’re Beautiful – was played a NUMBER of times, it stuck in my head.  Do you know what it’s like to have I got the moo-ooo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oves like Jagger going through your head on repeat for 54 hours straight?  I swear I even dreamed about moving like Jagger.  SOMEBODY MAKE IT STOP.

And this is what my life has become

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I swore I wouldn’t write another post about the renovation, and yet it consumes me, dear reader.  My life is swallowed by the renovation, and the working around the contractor’s schedule, and the I need to choose a light fixture thinking that I have right now.  I’m even boring myself.  Be thankful you don’t need to enter into boring conversation with me on a daily basis – or if you do, and you’re reading this, I’m sorry for being so boring. 

Yesterday the bathroom was completely gutted – save for the toilet, a relief since I had a mid-level worry that someone would spontaneously contract a virulent stomach flu and would have to be herded, barfing, down the carpeted stairs to the basement bathroom, not that we have even had the stomach flu for the longest time (knock knock knocking on the hardwood floor) – the rock was chiseled off the fireplace, and the front entry tiles were removed.  Prior to this, the head contractor told me There will be some dust and noise.  INDEED.  Barkley and I hid downstairs, for the most part, since it was pouring rain and I needed to be on hand in case of questions.  At one point the air in the house was white with fine dust, and after the task was completed and I was trying to set a world record on Number Of Times One Can Clean The Same Floor Area In A Four Hour Period, dust still magically reappeared.  Perhaps it was just hanging in the air waiting for me to finish cleaning before landing, yet again, or perhaps it was asexually reproducing; I don’t know.  All I know is that I have turned into a dusty Lady Macbeth, but without the mur-diddly-urder.  So not really like Lady Macbeth at all. 

How is your June going?  A large number of my friends greet June with great dread, due to all the year-end parties and wrap-ups and recitals and whatnot.  It’s not a bad month for me; the only thing I really have going on is Super Soccer Saturday, which is really just half a day, and only involves a small amount of volunteer effort on my part.  I did panic at one point and asked my friend who was organizing the volunteers if she had me scheduled to cook the hot dogs, and so, could I NOT cook the hot dogs, and she looked at me like I was crazy and assured me that she never, ever thought of having me cook the hot dogs, at which information I was greatly relieved.  WHEW.  So things are not bad, June-wise.  I mean, except for the dust and all.

Have you ever had one of those moments of incredulity, where you wonder This is what my life has come down to?  How did this happen?  I’m having one of those moments RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND.

I am speaking at our school’s kindergarten orientation tonight, to drum up interest about the School Council and Parent Association.  Oh, ha ha ha ha!  Good times.  The parents at the kindergarten orientation are generally more full of angst that their baby is heading to kindergarten/ relief that their child has made it to kindergarten to be genuinely interested in helping to weed the naturalization area, but you never know.  I am FULL OF OPTIMISM that someone will want to assauge their feelings of lost babyhood by rashly signing up for something. 

My neighbour – Beeps‘ “daddy” – informed me excitedly that we have new neighbours.  We do?  I didn’t realize.  I am home all day long, how could I not notice something like a new neighbour?  I wondered if I was just cluelessly going about my day, not noticing a moving truck, but he was referring to the new tenants in the rental house across the alley from me.  Oh, I said, did you meet them?  Well, not the people, he said.  But, he said, in the excited voice that adults everywhere talk to small children, there’s a puppy and a kitty!  I wondered how old Beeps’ “daddy” thinks I am, and if I should be flattered or alarmed.  Later I did notice a large, friendly looking black dog in the yard.  I immediately wondered if I should go introduce myself to the new neighbours.  Perhaps I should warn them about Beeps’ idiocy and propensity to escape.  You never know, they may need to borrow a shovel.