Author Archives: Nicole Boyhouse

Happy Easter!

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“I know that Santa is not real,” Mark said ponderously, “But what about the Easter Bunny?”

I considered for a moment before replying, “What do you think, honey? Do you think a bunny will hop into our house with a basket of treats?”

Mark thought for a moment. “No. That doesn’t really make sense. How would a bunny open the door?”

Is this where I’m supposed to answer “MAGIC”?

Anyway, we have been busy, people, with various egg-colouring projects and other spring-related crafts.

We’re a talented family, no?

I took a cue from a much more imaginative friend and filled little plastic eggs with written clues about where various Easter treats were hidden in the house. My husband was puzzled by this method – “can’t they just look for the treats?” – but I was adamant about it being FUN and not only that, Mark could practice his reading. He looked at me like I just taped a Kick Me sign on my own back. There’s nothing like incorporating educational value into an Easter egg hunt. Nonetheless, the boys really did enjoy the hunt because that crazy bunny hid treats everywhere from the dryer to Jake’s underwear drawer. Fun!


Little bunny footprints leading to the basket o’ clues.

We had Easter dinner at my parents’ yesterday, with my brothers and sisters-in-law and all my nieces and nephews. My mother made ham AND turkey, so Jake was happy, and we were combining this family gathering with Mark’s birthday so our contribution to the dinner was this:

Yes, the good people at Dairy Queen made us a giant Muk-Muk cake, which was a little too much for fifteen people and so I ate a very large leftover piece this morning, which left me feeling somewhat nauseous for the rest of the day, but oh so worth it. The remainder of the day has been spent in a rather leisurely fashion, with Mark and his dad raking the lawn and Jake surreptitiously playing with Mark’s new Star Wars action figures obtained only yesterday, and then later an outdoor hard-boiled egg hunt that fortunately did not conclude with the dog consuming said eggs.

I hope that, whether or not you celebrate Easter, you have had a beautiful weekend, this lovely first weekend of April.

I don’t go out much

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You know how, when you are looking forward to going to your very favourite restaurant for weeks, and you pore over the online menu and decide what you are going to order, in extreme detail, and you think about that amazing meal and you think about it and – after all you go out for dinner only a few times a year – you obsess over it and then the day is finally here and you dress up in an actual dress, the very one you bought for your husband’s company Christmas party that you sadly did not attend and you get to the restaurant, starving and drooling a little, practically crazed with anticipation, you open the actual non-online menu and the item you have been dreaming about is no longer available? And for a few minutes you just feel completely bereft, like there are no more important issues in the world than the fact that you cannot order linguine with sundried tomatoes and olives?

But then you find that, regardless of the printed menu, the chef can accommodate you and you get exactly what you want?

It’s wonderful.

All of which is to say that our anniversary dinner was a lovely success. “Can you believe we’ve been married eight years?” I said dreamily, sipping my second cosmopolitan. “It seems longer” my husband replied somewhat less romantically. “But in a good way” he amended.

When you’ve been married a while, it’s easy to take certain things for granted: like who is going to take out the recycling or who is going to wash the dishes. When you have babies or small children your relationship can be not unlike that of fellow zookeepers or perhaps roommates with particularly difficult pets, where you cease to talk about anything not related to your shared responsibilities and their food and toileting preferences. Another thing about being married for a while is that you become predictable to each other. I can, for example, predict perfectly the two things my husband finds most irritating about me: my fondness for going to sleep before 9:30 pm, and my eating preferences. “It’s a pain in the ass being married to a vegetarian,” he mutters semi-weekly. He probably also is irritated by my baby-talking to the dog, but whatever. I can also predict that, now that golf season has begun, I will see a whole lot less of him; but on the upside, I will be able to watch NYPD Blue reruns without interference.

The beautiful thing about being married a while, the beauty of predictability, is that when you come back to the table from the ladies’ room you find your husband has talked to the waitress and ordered you a contraband linguine with sundried tomatoes and olives, plus a gorgeous glass of cabernet, and you can only smile at his probable conversation with her, “It’s a pain she’s a vegetarian,” he’d say, “I’ll have the New York striploin.” It’s just what I might have predicted.

Girls! Gone! Wild!

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Today is a full moon and I follow with yogic tradition to not practice but take rest on moon days, which means that I slept a full hour and a half later than normal. Pure luxury! Since it is Spring! Break! and we had nowhere in particular to be today, I fulfilled my dream of leisurely coffee drinking; sipping eight – eight! – cups while watching Breakfast Television, or what I like to refer to ironically and with air quotes as “the news”.

Digression: while in university I was friends with a girl who referred to Entertainment Tonight as “the news”.

Speaking of Entertainment Tonight masquerading as the news, remember the OJ Simpson trial? I…don’t really, at the time I was much too absorbed in the fascinating dual worlds of the history of economic thought and step aerobics to pay much attention to it, but I do remember that beach bum houseguest Kato Kaelin, in all his dimwitted glory. I was startled to discover, many years later, the numerous careers that were launched due to a grisly murder trial. For example, Star Jones?

Digression to digression: how strange is it that OJ was acquitted at that time, yet the vast majority of the general population believes him to be a grisly murderer?

Wow, how did I get there? Eight cups of coffee is too much, people, especially when coupled with ninety extra minutes of sleep.

So, spring break good news and bad news.

Good news: The zoo was fantastic yesterday, we had an incredible day. It was the kind of day that I don’t trust myself to talk to people because I would surely boast about my amazing kids and their fantastic personalities and how wonderful they are. I even said to my husband that I felt sorry for him that he is not the stay at home parent.

Bad news: Karma. Today the boys have been fidgety, quarrelsome, and moody. They are DRIVING ME CRAZY. Crazier than normal.

Good news: We made caterpillars out of egg cartons!

Bad news: The groomer was sick and Barkley still stinks.

Good news: The weather was decent enough to send Mark outside to play, which improved his mood immensely. I watched him run around the yard with several garden implements, pretending to shoot and destroy various imaginary aliens.

Bad news: He accidentally hit himself in the head with a garden implement and had to come inside, where he and Jake played for all of five minutes before the game dissolved into an angry argument.

Good news: I baked a yummy looking loaf of bread and a banana loaf.

Bad news: I am not enjoying playing endless games of dinosaurs and killings that the boys are requesting of me, but yet I am acutely aware that they will not want to play with their mother much longer. Melancholy.

Good news: We still have seven days left of spring break, and it is a full moon, and I am focusing all my positive energy on tomorrow; tomorrow is another day.

Good news: We are having a great time!

Bad news: You can’t tell from the picture that this is a parasauralophus.

Happy Thoughts!

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It rained on Friday, which is highly unusual at this time of year – normally precipitation takes the form of snow – and the city smelled so fresh and clean, also a highly unusual occurrence.

It was dark and grey though, and I’m choosing to believe that was the reason that Costco, haven for bad humour everywhere, housed even more grouchy people than usual. For this post I considered writing merely “I took two kids to Costco on a rainy Friday. The End.” and that would have been a fairly complete description of my day.

It wasn’t the kids. They were actually exceedingly helpful: Mark fetching items I’d asked for and depositing them gently into the cart, Jake frequently looking at my face with some alarm and saying “Mom? Mom? Are you okay, Mom?” Because I’m sure I looked somewhat distressed at the human condition as see in Costco: strangers snapping at each other for their objectionable cart etiquette, children screaming, babies crying, drivers trying to run over pedestrians at high speeds in the parking lot. The fact of us making it out of there unscathed, with the items we went in for, no less, seemed to me to be somewhat miraculous.

So I felt Swistle’s post about happy thoughts was very timely, although she was talking about taxes, and not disturbing Costco trips, but still, here is my list of things that are making me happy right now:

1) Spring break! Girls gone wild! And by girls I mean me, and by wild I mean I’m going to enjoy drinking coffee at a leisurely pace rather than my usual habit of chugging down as much caffeine as humanly possible whilst striving to remain patient, yet encouraging, in the matter of the kids getting dressed, etc., recalling that comments like “What the? For the love of….just get your socks on already!” are not particularly helpful in this type of situation.

2) We’re going to the zoo tomorrow! I used to take the kids all the time when they were smaller but we have not been since school started. There is a new dinosaur display, with some funky animatronic dinos, that I am expecting to be quite entertaining. Plus, Jake is fascinated by the hippos and the fish that eat their fecal matter, and viewing that display always leads to some interesting and enlightening conversation.

3) The weather, other than the brief rainy spell, has been spectacular and not only have I been playing in the garden (so many little perennial sprouts, squee), but I have been able to send the boys outside. Yay spring.

4) My stinky dog is getting groomed tomorrow. Perhaps they will put a little bandanna on him.

5) I have a date! I have a date! My husband and I are going out to my favourite restaurant to belatedly celebrate our anniversary; dinner AND babysitting courtesy of my generous parents. I’ve already looked at the online menu to decide what, exactly, I am going to order, right down to a cosmopolitan to start, to make me feel all Carrie Bradshaw and whatnot. Without creepy Mr. Big.

So, dear readers, what makes you happy right now? Let’s start the week off right and tell me, what is putting a smile on your face today?

Actually, I prefer the term "Big Fat Whore"

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After I posted the pictures of my sad little flat cake, a friend suggested I cut it in half and make a mini layer cake out of it, which struck me, quite frankly, as brilliant. It worked perfectly, although Jake and I went a little crazy with the confetti sprinkles.

Don’t I look relieved? The cake isn’t ruined after all.


Mark loved it.
I rarely read any of those “Fame Baby” articles, mostly because I couldn’t care less about what Suri Cruise is wearing these days or what kind of stroller some celebrity I vaguely recognize purchased. However, I was drawn to a blurb about the Brady/Bundchen baby, mainly because my husband is a New England Patriots fan, meaning that to maintain marital harmony I am as well, and although Tom Brady is a little young for my tastes he sure is a tasty slice of rye.

I immediately wished I hadn’t been so eager to see #12 because the latter half of the blurb focused on the return of Giselle Bundchen’s glorious figure mere months after giving birth. Giselle herself was quoted as follows, “I think a lot of people get pregnant and decide they can turn into garbage disposals. I was mindful of what I ate and only gained 30 pounds.”

I felt about this comment the same way I feel when someone boasts about their six week old baby sleeping through the night, or their child who eats everything set in front of him, or their toddler who was toilet trained at eighteen months: that is, efforts in that direction are helpful, but there is some kind of underlying genetic code that makes this possible. If your newborn sleeps through the night, that does not necessarily mean that it is because of your superior parenting skills – although you may have superior parenting skills, don’t get me wrong – but it is more to do with your individual child than anything else. The implication to Giselle’s comment is that if we all weren’t such disgusting garbage disposals, perhaps we too could be on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, which is, of course, not possible. I am not denying that I actually was a garbage disposal during my first pregnancy: you do not gain as much junk in the trunk as I did without some serious gorging. However, not counting my gross Cheez Whiz on toast addiction during my second pregnancy, I did watch what I ate and I did gain only 32 pounds, which was significantly, significantly less than my first, and even still I was not a contender for a Victoria’s Secret spread. That is because I am not Giselle Bundchen. I could put all my best efforts into it and there is no way that I could ever become a supermodel.

Do you know what I’m saying here? Mindful eating is a huge part of maintaining your figure before and after childbirth, yes, of course. But boasting about your amazing willpower without laying any credit on personal genetics, not to mention the childcare, personal chefs, nutritionists, and trainers available to someone of Giselle Bundchen’s income bracket is not helpful to the rest of us.

I eat sweets very rarely, I eat desserts even less, for a variety of reasons, not all of them to do with weight. After I read this blurb I enjoyed a delicious slice of Mark’s birthday cake. And I was mindful of every bite.

Astonishment

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When I think that Mark is turning six tomorrow, I am astonished. He has evolved from a squalling, spiky haired newborn to a gangly, spiky haired six year old. Six years ago, his single greatest accomplishment was latching on correctly; last week he got his first report card. I could repeat every single cliché about the rapid passage of time, and it would not be enough.

But yet time did not speed by, not always; there were many interminable days and weeks and months, when the clock moved so very slowly, as anyone at home with small children can relate. Often when the boys are in school I will run errands amid mothers who are still in that stage; they are exhausted, and frantic, and desperate just to get out of their houses; they are corralling preschoolers and soothing crying infants and looking mortified at their tantruming toddlers and I know, I know they feel that this stage will never pass but I look at them with sympathy and think it will. It will and it does and in hindsight it is a mere blink of an eye.

I have written about my pregnancy and labour here and here, and so I will try not to repeat myself.

The day my doctor poked my puffy, pre-eclampsic face and announced I would be induced within twenty-four hours, I was astonished, astonished that it was actually happening, on my wedding anniversary no less, that I was going to be a mother. When Mark was born I felt overwhelmed, adoring, and astonished at my sheer luckiness. I still feel that way, six years later.

It’s Party Time, It’s Excellent

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Sorry about the lame title. Mike Myers, you have made a fool of us all.

Tuesday will be Mark’s sixth birthday – sixth! – and so yesterday we took the boys and a few friends bowling. The kids seemed to really enjoy it, which is something I tend to feel quite anxious about while hosting a children’s birthday party. I’m not exactly sure what I think is going to happen; like instead of a birthday party I’m going to be holding several children in a disastrous chamber of horrors which will cause them to go home scarred and crying and their mothers will all hate me and I will be infamous as the mother who cannot host a proper birthday party. Anyway. The kids had fun although in reality – rather than in my crazy head-space – kids are very likely to have fun in any situation involving cupcakes and loot bags, so my birthday party anxiety is largely unfounded.

Speaking of cupcakes, we always have a plethora of them and I end up giving them away so as to not devour them all but all of my containers are currently in use so I decided – erroneously, as it turns out – that it would be optimal to make one dozen cupcakes plus one small cake, the latter to freeze for Mark’s actual birthday. Here is the result:


Behold, the world’s flattest cake. A crepe cake, if you will.


Maybe I should have used a smaller pan.

Perhaps it will improve with frosting. Or…perhaps not. Remember my gingerbread house? I am simply not gifted in this department, people, I need to accept that.