Author Archives: Nicole Boyhouse

Fall Follies

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So our September summer now appears to be emphatically over, so it’s time for me to put away those t-shirts and bring out my vast array of black, grey, and charcoal sweaters. Yes, I did make a distinction between grey and charcoal.

I’m not a huge fan of fall, perhaps because it begins and ends very suddenly here and then all we are left with is a long, long winter. If I lived in a more temperate climate, perhaps I would feel differently. One thing I do like about fall – other than pretty leaves and back-to-school – is preparing for holidays like Thanksgiving and Halloween, and that is in spite of the fact that I have a horror of Thanksgiving dinners. I have never liked meals that involve turkeys, or any meat that is so graphically displayed. Shudder. I realize that I’m in the vast minority with these feelings, mind you, so I really do understand if Thanksgiving is the highlight of your year – it’s just not my personal cup of tea.

Anyway, there really aren’t any good decorating holidays in the summer, so it’s kind of fun to break out the cool decorations for Thanksgiving and Halloween. My kids are now at the age where they are pretty excited to see severed arms, chainsaws, and whatnot in Wal-Mart, so I’m sure we will at some point end up with those festive arrangements on my front lawn. Here’s what we have so far:

That’s Jake’s Frankenstein monster, dancing in the (cold, cold) wind. I more or less told him the story of the Frankenstein monster, censoring it appropriately, of course. What has bedeviled him are the staples on the monster’s face. “Wouldn’t that hurt so much?” he asked. Uh, yeah, probably.

This is Mark’s Dracula. Nothing says Happy Halloween like a blood-thirsty vampire!


This fellow was named Dummy Jimmy Too Tall. My kids are awesome at naming things! This guy is about five feet tall, and scares the hell out of my dog.

Isn’t he cute? The scarecrow is in the front yard, which means the dog only sees it when we are going for a walk. The first couple of times he saw it he cried, whimpered, barked, and tried to run away – all at the same time. I laughingly told my husband about this, but Mark, overhearing, welled up and wanted to take the scarecrow back to the store so he wouldn’t frighten Barkley anymore. Aw. I told him Barkley would get used to it and he has, mostly just eying Dummy Jimmy warily as we walk by. You never know about those scarecrows! Sssspppooookkkkyyy.

Canadian Hero

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Mark ran in his very first Terry Fox run yesterday. It was such a gorgeous sunny day and it was so inspiring to see the kids bringing in Toonies for Terry, running their hearts out, proudly collecting their hand stamps for each lap completed. Privately I looked at the size of the field and wondered how many laps the kindergarteners would actually complete, but Mark ran seven, and I was so proud of him.

The remainder of the day, predictably, was spent discussing Terry Fox’s legacy. I don’t know about you, but I really struggle with finding a balance between being honest without being frightening, especially at this age, where kids tend to be so black and white. I myself was the type of child who would focus on imminent disaster and worst-case scenarios. I clearly recall Fire Safety Week at my elementary school, when a visiting firefighter casually mentioned a statistic that all Canadians would at some point be affected by a fire in their lives. He may as well have told me that my house was going to burn down tomorrow. I was terrified about fire for years after and had frequent nightmares. I also have a major thing for firefighters. Is it the uniform? The ability to save people? The bravery? I don’t know, but hubba hubba.

Back to the subject at hand. How do you talk to young children about death and illness? I told them that when Terry Fox was doing the Marathon of Hope, people gave him money which he then used to help sick people. The questions kept coming all day, including “How did he get cancer?” I had been fairly clear and honest about all previous questions, but that one threw me. I tried to focus on his heroism, but I found it impossible to keep from getting teary-eyed.

Terry Fox was someone’s son, someone’s baby. He was a true hero. Later, I watched the boys in the back yard running laps, playing “Terry Fox Run”, I looked at their healthy bodies, their healthy legs, and I cried with gratitude.

Heat Wave!

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Alert! I am going to talk about the weather! I have become your grandma and I’m going to discuss the current weather conditions!

We are having a heat wave! In Calgary! In September! It’s glorious, I tell you. Other than spotting my neighbour shirtless, it has been one lovely day. For one thing, we are all back to our normal state of health, which is pretty nice. For another, I am wearing Capri pants, sandals, and a sleeveless top and it is SEPTEMBER! Given we had frost on Monday, that feels extremely luxurious, like if I wasn’t actually in my own house on a residential street, I might think that I had somehow hopped on a plane to somewhere exotic. Or at least somewhere that has pleasant weather conditions.

We spent the afternoon at a friend’s house. You know what’s really nice? When your friend’s kids are your kid’s friends. It makes a lovely playdate when you can catch up with a friend and your children are not squalling in the background, or asking when it’s time to go home, or some other such scenario.

So we had a lovely day, complete with sprinkler and sandbox, and despite the fact that the leaves are falling with rapidity, and there are frost warnings in the five-day forecast, I could pretend it was still summer.

Sick Day

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The thing about back-to-school is all the back-to-illness that seems to come with it. “Hey, Mom!” Mark said gleefully, “You’ll never believe it! The school has water fountains and I can drink from them whenever I want to!” For someone like me – and I say this without pride – the knowledge that Mark has been drinking out of a public fountain practically necessitates the consumption of a tranquillizer. I could almost visualize the germy viruses entering his body via the water fountain. What I’m saying is that I have a teensy bit of a germ phobia. And by teensy bit, of course, I mean that I’m having a love affair with hand sanitizer. I love hand sanitizer so much, I want to take it out back behind a middle school and get it pregnant. On that note, anyone know when the season premiere of 30 Rock is on?

Anyway, Mark has been in school for almost a month and is sick, again. The first time was a very minor case of the sniffles, and the second time – the current incident – was a cold that morphed into a gross, hacking cough. It was worse on the weekend, but this morning he woke up pale and hollow eyed and said he wasn’t sure he could go to school today.

And I let him stay home!

By 9:30 he was playing happily with his brother, coughing only sporadically and making me feel like I just allowed my five-year-old to play hooky.

It seems that I have two little Nicoles on my shoulders: one who thinks, austerely, that unless a child is vomiting, feverish, or completely incapacitated, he should attend his learning institution without fail. The other one thought about all the other pale, coughing, hollow-eyed kindergarteners lined up for class and thought maybe everyone deserves a sick day now and then.

It’s a hard call, this middle ground. I mean, I don’t want to send a slightly sick child to school and then have it morph into a massive, feverish illness that makes me feel completely negligent, not to mention responsible for the infection of all his classmates, but I feel silly keeping home a slightly sick child who becomes, apparently, JUST FINE. I guess the latter scenario has much less dire consequences. Anyway, I will chalk this up to a day of rest and send him to school tomorrow – because the other Nicole? The little austere one on my shoulder? She’s killing me!

Weekends

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Saturday morning I saw my neighbours – a younger couple with no children – loading up their vehicle to go hiking in the mountains. I felt odd, like I was viewing some strange yet familiar ritual from another country that I used to inhabit. My husband and I used to head out nearly every weekend to the mountains, with our hiking boots and backpacks filled with extra clothes, water, and a lunch. We would choose a hike from a guidebook, and it would usually be around 10 km in length, and after that we would stop in a pub on the way home for a beer and dinner. It was a part of our lives, the lives we had before children.

We took the kids and the dog to the mountains for a “hike” this summer. I wore sandals, and we walked a total of less than one kilometer.

I knew a number of people who, while pregnant, were firm in the belief that the impending baby was not going to change their lives. Not at all. They would still travel to exotic destinations, work slave-like hours at their jobs, maintain rigorous levels of athleticism, and do all the same things on weekends that they did before. Their lives would be exactly the same, but there would be a baby with them to live those lives.

To me, this way of thinking indicates either extreme fear of the unknown or extreme stupidity. Things change. To imply that a person, a baby no less, will not have any impact on your life is disrespectful. I read a beautiful piece by the lovely Beck, who said, “…we change and our hearts change right along with us”. That resonated with me as I do feel like my heart has changed, it has opened in a way that it couldn’t before. I won’t be that girl with the hiking boots and guidebook again, and although sometimes I think her with longing, I wouldn’t change places with her for anything.

Post-Birthday Depression

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I knew today would be a bad day. I wonder if that is a self-fulfilling prophecy? I mean, if you think a day is going to be bad, does that mean that karmically you are making your day bad? I’ve been reading this interesting book called “How Yoga Works” and it talks about sowing seeds, positive and negative, and I can’t help but think that if I believe a day is going to be bad, then it will be bad.

It’s all my fault anyway. I was talking to a friend on Monday and I said that I couldn’t believe how well Jake was doing with all this birthday attention. He had been looking forward to his own birthday for about seven months, and I thought with all the buildup there would be a major letdown. That hasn’t happened, I said happily to my friend, I keep waiting for the ball to drop. And let me tell you, people, the freaking ball has dropped. It dropped hard. It dropped so hard it left a big, smoking hole in the ground and all that is left is me, wondering when I will learn not to bring curses upon myself.

Last night there was the post-birthday meltdown and ensuing sadness “I don’t want it to not be my birthday!” that kept Jake up an hour past his normal bedtime, which is highly unusual for him, being the type of kid who falls asleep seconds after going to bed. Needless to say, he was pretty tired today, and started to cry when I left him at school. It’s so heartbreaking to watch a four-year-old stoically wiping away silent tears, walking in his lineup with his giant backpack on. I felt totally deflated, despite knowing that after I left, he would be just fine. And he was, but the rest of the day was one big roller coaster of emotions. It’s hard to blame the kid: he’s exhausted after all, plus he has post-birthday depression. After four days of various celebrations, one is bound to succumb to the doldrums.

But the celebrations were great, especially the one that included eight small kids and a clown. If you live in the Calgary area, I would really recommend Button the Clown – she was very entertaining for that age group, and not at all creepy. Just make sure you call her Button, not Buttons. When I called to confirm, I got her husband (and I’m not making this up) Buddy the Clown on the phone. He tersely said, “Her name is Button. She is not plural.” Oh, snap! When I related this conversation to a friend, she said, “Button the Clown is married to Buddy the Clown? I wonder if they have clown babies.” And I will confess that the image that immediately popped into my head was so incredibly disturbing that I had to question my own mental stability. Again.

Anyway, I’m going for an early bedtime tonight and I’m going to sow the seeds of positive thoughts for a better day tomorrow. Repeat after me, it’s going to be a good day….

Labour Stories – Part Three, Jake’s Birthday

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As I vaguely remember from my days as one gainfully employed, getting called into work is no fun, in fact, it is enough to ruin your day. At the very least, it doesn’t bring out the best in you. That sums up the scenario with my delivery nurse, Cheryl. You see, when I was in labour with Jake, the hospital was packed with labouring women and women waiting for scheduled c-sections. This is what you get for getting pregnant at Christmas. All these women getting a little present from Santa, and nine months later hospitals are experiencing a mini baby boom. So what I’m saying is that the morning I arrived at the hospital, there was a shortage of rooms and nurses. So Cheryl was called in early, and not all that happy about it. To be fair, my delivery nurse with my first baby was Shannon, a youthful and eager nurse who held my hands during each contraction, and who set the expectation bar pretty high. All I clearly remember about Cheryl, really, is that she had a fabulous manicure. Her nails were gorgeous, and after each contraction she would look up from them and say “Was that a bad one?”

My labour was going quickly, so that it was not long after arriving in my delivery room that Cheryl looked up from her nails to say that the contractions were too close together for me to even get checked out, and she called the doctor. Now, I don’t blame Cheryl for her lethargy. Probably she was overworked and tired. Also I was just there, less than 18 months before, having a baby, so the whole process was still quite fresh in my mind: it wasn’t like I was a first-timer. The person I blame is my husband. He actually had the audacity to complain of being tired. Tired! I leave my response to the reader’s imagination.

On September 15, at 10:45 a.m., Jake was born. Our Jake. He is four years old today and a joy in my life: funny, smart, and loving. When he was born I said, with my usual grace and composure, “Thank God I’m not doing that again!” But what I meant was, Jake completed our family, and brings happiness to our lives every day. Thanks Cheryl, for helping him into this world, thank you from the bottom of my heart.