I have an article up over at Yummy Mummy. Go check it out and read all about my penchant for non-exciting travel. I also allude to a really gross intestinal bug I once contracted. If that doesn’t get you reading, I don’t know what will! See you there!
Author Archives: Nicole Boyhouse
Will I be pretty, will I be rich?
One thing I find very entertaining about children – especially small children – are their career goals. Very small children have somewhat abstract ideas about what they will be when they grow up; I clearly remember wishing to be a flower. And now I have a flower profile picture on my blog! Profound. Anyway, both of my boys went through a prolonged period in which their burning ambition was to drive a garbage truck; I don’t want to sound snobbish here, we all know the importance of sanitation workers and the difficult job that they do, but I was kind of glad when that phase passed. As of today, Jake’s career ambition, strangely, is to be a mountain climber. Does that mean he wants to be a vagabond? Or maybe he will be a mountain climber and write books, like that guy who wrote Into Thin Air. If so, cool. Mark alternates between a path of paleontology and being a “business man”. We went to visit my husband at the office one day, and Mark stretched out on his swivel chair and said luxuriantly, “Is this where you make all the money, Dad?”. I could just imagine what he thought the world of work was like. I guess it was not unlike my experience in grad school, where I thought that with my economics degrees I would somehow change the world for the better, and then I ended up working as a quantitative analyst in natural gas option trading. Totally NOT changing the world for the better, but an interesting job nonetheless.
Anyway, the kindergarten is doing a Community Helpers unit at school, better known in my day as “What will I do when I grow up?”, and I was helping in the classroom. I had a group of four to cycle through the various work centers and in a slow moment at the dentist center (an awesome craft of painting a yellow paper tooth white with the help of toothbrushes and a mixture of corn syrup and white paint) I asked my group what they wanted to be when they grew up. The group consisted of two sweet and well-behaved girls, a disruptive and somewhat hyper boy, and a boy who the teacher euphemistically informed me “requires extra assistance with the activities”. One girl, predictably, wanted to be a ballerina, the other wanted to be a mom. I was a little surprised; I didn’t know girls said they wanted to be moms anymore. Nonetheless, I praised their decisions with enthusiasm. Disruptive and Somewhat Hyper Boy told me he wanted to be a cop and shoot all the bad guys! Bang bang bang! I answered that police officers are very important Community Helpers. Then I asked the Boy Who Requires Extra Assistance what he wanted to be. His answer: a princess. I was, momentarily, speechless. He looked up at me, smiling, waiting for the positive commentary I had given his classmates. One of the girls said “He can’t be a princess! He’s a boy!” – to which I rallied, and said that anyone can be anything they want to be when they grow up, if they work at it.
It’s something I tell the boys all the time, but I don’t entirely believe it. I mean, if you work really hard at something AND you have some degree of aptitude, then yes, you can be what you want to be. But really, no matter what amount of effort I put into it, no matter how hard I work, there are some career options that are forever closed to me: becoming a supermodel, say, or an Olympic shotputter, or a NASA scientist, or anything at all requiring artistic ability. I could, as the hockey players say, give it 110%, and I would still achieve minimal, if any, success in those fields.
But who wants to quash the kindergartener spirit? Certainly not me. Even if the Boy Who Requires Extra Assistance wants to be a princess, well, it’s probably only marginally less likely to occur than his classmate becoming a ballerina. So I guess we all can dream.
Poppies
I wrote the following last year on Remembrance Day. My husband’s friend is heading to Afghanistan in March, for a riskier assignment. My oldest son is now enthralled with the military. He is obsessed with all things army. He is five. It breaks my heart on many levels. I want to instill respect and honour in my boys, but I struggle with discussions about war and the role of the military. I cannot watch any war footage without noting how very young the soldiers are. I am, as always on November 11, remembering.
I don’t want to discuss the politics of war, not today. I don’t want to discuss egos, power struggles, or strange ulterior motives. I don’t want to discuss how looking at the young, young faces in war footage makes me sad or how images of rows of white crosses makes me feel physically ill. I am fully cognizant about how wars begin and about both sides of the story. My husband has a dear friend in the military who has already completed one tour of duty in Afghanistan and may be sent for another. But that is not what I want to discuss.
What I was thinking about today is that I have two boys. If they were growing up in a different era, say an era of conscription, maybe I would have none. Or maybe I would still have two boys, but they would be scarred for life, mentally or physically. Maybe I would be waiting months for a letter, only to get a censored one with little information. Maybe the boys would be suffering in ways I can’t even imagine, for reasons that start small but grow to be bigger than life. When I see the wreaths being laid by the mothers and families of the fallen, that is what I think of.
The boys came home from preschool with their poppy crafts and lots of questions. I tried to answer with honesty, yet who wants to be too honest with children that age? How do you discuss war with children who don’t comprehend why so-and-so hit another kid in their class or so-and-so called someone else a stupid-head? I used words like bravery, respect, standing up for what you believe in, but the explanations are too vague even for such young children.
When I see an elderly man in a parking lot, getting out of his car with a veteran license plate, I swallow hard and think about the mother who cried with joy when her son came home.
Clutter
You know when you wake up in the morning, and you realize that you are actually drowning in clutter, that your entire household is one big clutter pile; this despite the fact that all the clutter is contained in cute little baskets, because now instead of being drowning in clutter, you are drowning in baskets that are filled with clutter, and you just can’t stand it one more minute? That is how it was with me yesterday. As far as I can tell, there are only two options at this juncture: a) buy a bigger house and fill it with even more clutter, or b) stay in the existing house and get rid of the clutter. I guess there is also a third option, c) maintain the status quo, but yesterday, that seemed like a death sentence. Death by clutter, I guess.
And so, armed with a pot of coffee I decided to attack our house. I went through those cluttered baskets and made three piles: donate, recycle, and garbage. Here is the sad part: the garbage pile was the largest of all. The thing is, we don’t buy our children many toys, but they seem to have a lot of toys from birthdays, Christmas, indulgent grandparents. Some of them last a long time, but a lot break easily and are not recyclable. This is what I was dealing with yesterday: a giant garbage bag full of broken plastic toys that are destined for a landfill.
It makes me sick. You know what else makes me sick? The article I read the other day about a six-year-old girl’s birthday party and the myriad of gifts that she received. The author – a fairly famous author – detailed the FORTY expensive gifts she had received and expensive loot bags that were given out at her party. In the end, the author weighed in that there was a possibility that kids receiving so much stuff could become spoiled and unappreciative, but hey, what’s a birthday without a ton of presents?
It’s not like I want my kids to be all Little House on the Prairie, being ecstatic that they received a pair of mittens and their very own tin cup in their stocking, so now they don’t have to share a cup between two people anymore, how amazing, and also, a stick of candy! WOW! But I do want them to appreciate the things that they have and although they certainly get nowhere near forty gifts on any occasion, they do have a lot of toys. With Christmas coming up we are talking a lot about charity, about giving, but still I worry about them being spoiled and unappreciative. I especially worried about that today, Mark’s balloon that he was blowing up burst, and he fell into a fit of sulking because we had no more balloons in the house, and why didn’t we have more balloons, and HE REALLY WANTED A BALLOON. The house is filled with games, books, puzzles, toys, but HIS LIFE WAS OVER BECAUSE WE DIDN’T HAVE ANY BALLOONS. I really struggle with this kind of thing, with instilling appreciation and values, and sometimes it just feels like I’m not doing it right.
Besides the fact that our household just contributed a giant bag of plastic crap to the local landfill. It makes me sick.
The pediatric dentist is HOT
Was that me who was bragging about how well my children adjusted to the end of Daylight Savings? After only one day? I think in Greek mythology that would be known as hubris.
I am going to spare you the tearful, fighting-with-one’s-brother, collapsing into a teenage-angst-type-sulkiness details and instead talk about something pleasant. I took the kids to the dentist yesterday! Did I mention that their dentist happens to be quite attractive? Like, hot? I’m always somewhat surprised that the waiting room isn’t full of slavering moms in various stages of cougardom, with various degrees of cleavage showing. I myself dressed up to take the kids; by dressed up, I mean I wore my knee high boots with heels and my toffee lipstick, as opposed to the more neutral shell shade. And…we got there and were informed that the dentist was sick today, and would we mind seeing his colleague? His much older, unattractive colleague? Of course we didn’t mind.
Now, I had promised not to write about the “f” word until I actually get the “f” word, and I’m not going to, but I’m just going to say that if you go to the pediatric dentist and he is sick and every single toy and book that they use to distract kids and make the dentist’s office a happy place is being sterilized, and one dentist is doing the work of two dentists, well, you may be waiting a while doing low-tech games like I Spy and repeating silly rhymes over and over. Which is exactly what we did. And because I have boys, a lot of silly rhymes were of the gross bodily function theme. Anyway, the checkup itself went just fine, despite the fact that every time we go there seems to be at least one child being ax-murdered in the background. At least that is what it sounds like. But now that I’ve written that down, it will probably be my child doing the child-from-The-Exorcist impression next time – because that is called hubris.
Weekend Update
1. I purchased 250 candies for Halloween, and lovingly made up twenty little gift bags with an assortment of goodies. If we got more than twenty trick-or-treaters, I thought, I would just give out the mini chocolate bars and bags of Sour Kids separately. The boys headed out to trick-or-treat and I stayed home to hand out candy, happily watching a recording of John Cusack (hubba hubba) on Jay Leno. I waited. And waited. I started to feel like some sad little debutante waiting for her date, who had obviously stood her up for a better option. (“He cometh not”, she said.) In the end I had two trick-or-treaters and now I have a plethora of candy with no home. Since trick-or-treaters were in short supply on our block, you can probably imagine the volume of candy amassed by my little pirate and dinosaur, who, technically, was an Allosaurus, not a T-Rex, because he was living in the Jurassic period, whereas the T-Rex lived in the Cretaceous period, just so you know. In addition, two very lovely neighbours actually went out and purchased special large treats just for them! Very kind, especially the neighbour who gave them candy popcorn, which the children have generously shared with me.
2. Another neighbour suggested that kids were not trick-or-treating much this year due to the swine flu, either because they had contracted it or because their parents were wary of them contracting it. If this is true, it is the last straw for me. I have reached saturation point with regards to information about the swine flu. This may or may not include helpful emails from certain people which detail that a) if you contract the flu, we are all going to die, or, alternately, b) if you get the flu shot, we are all going to die. I will write about the flu only if and when I or my family contracts the flu, and then I will simply whine about my symptoms, and NOT about conspiracy theories regarding the government, the pharmaceutical companies, and the sellers of hand sanitizers. I bet you are looking forward to that.
3. In years past, I dreaded the end of Daylight Savings Time, and not just because shortly it will be completely dark at 4:30 pm. I had the kind of children who would wake up at the exact same time every day no matter what time they went to bed, and it would take about a week – a cranky, sleep-deprived week – to adjust to the new time. There is something psychologically very bad about having a toddler wide awake at 4:58 am. “How did your kids do with the time change?” I blearily asked a mom at a playgroup, who subsequently looked at me like I was a little slow on the uptake. “Fine,” she said, “I just put them to bed an hour later and then they slept an hour later.” I looked at her, slack-jawed, like that was the most unbelievable, incredible piece of information I had ever received. But, huzzah! I am now part of that demographic! I put my kids to bed later, and they wake up later! It’s a miracle! They are not waking up at ungodly hours and morphing into crazed, sleep-deprived little goblins! And as a result, I am not a crazed, sleep-deprived, mid-thirties goblin! Hooray indeed.
Happy Halloween
Arrrrgh, mateys. If ye are sailing the high seas, be sure to guard ye treasure. There’s pirates about!
And if the pirates don’t get you, the dinosaurs will.
I was volunteering for the Pre-Kindergarten Halloween party today, and if I was the sort of person to drink during the day, I probably would have a shot. Or two. It wasn’t that bad. But if you put a class of 21 costumed and wired 4-year-olds in a setting where the activities are “decorate your own cookie”, “pin the nose on the Jack-o-Lantern”, “bowling for witches”, and the sedate, but somewhat tear-inspiring “Halloween Bingo”, well, let’s just say an adult-only beverage would have been nice. However. I do not drink during the day (exception is when I am on vacation at my in-laws) so I will be counting down until bedtime.