Category Archives: Festivities

Bad Wife!

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I spent much of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday doing a yoga workshop with Kino MacGregor, an amazing woman, and if yoga happens to be your thing, and she is doing a workshop near you, GO. GO TO IT. Even if it happens to coincide with a holiday for your baby daddy. It was a fabulous weekend, and I think I lost about ten pounds of water weight from SWEAT.


Isn’t she gorgeous? Please ignore the beads of sweat all over my face.

Of course, it was Father’s Day weekend, and so I felt vaguely guilty about spending so much time away from the house – Happy Father’s Day! Now, take care of the kids all weekend. – so I tried to assuage my guilt by making this cake:


Isn’t it pretty? Those are chocolate covered strawberries, and the cake itself was chocolate, so it was pretty delicious, believe me. I also tried to overcome my guilt by insisting that he golf after he dropped the kids off at school on Friday, which was the first time ever he had done the drop-off; I had to deep breathe and remind myself that he is not actually an idiot, and no calamity would occur, and the kids would make it to their classrooms. I think I have some control issues in this area. I also insisted he golf Saturday night, which ended up being a hilarious comedy of errors.

You know when your kids pass out of a certain stage, say the stage of having meltdowns and tantrums, and so you are not actually used to a meltdown or tantrum, and then one occurs? Well, it so happened that Saturday was the boys’ final soccer tournament, which meant they played two one hour games in the suddenly gorgeous sunshine. I stopped by to see their second game on my lunch break and also happened to come across the soccer mom/coach from hell, which is a very long story and one for another day. It was a busy day and apparently a very tiring one for Jake, because shortly after dinner he started to lose it. Here is what the boys’ conversation was like for approximately one hour:

“MARK’S NOT LETTING ME HAVE A TURN!!!”

“Jake, I said you could have a turn. You’re having a turn right now.”

“BUT IT’S NOT A VERY LONG TURN! AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”

“Jake, you can KEEP having the turn.”

“BUT YOU SAID WE WERE LOOKING FOR LIONS AND I WANTED TO LOOK FOR MONKEYS!”

“Okay, we can look for monkeys.”

“I WANT TO LOOK FOR PENGUINS!”

And so on. Lather, rinse, repeat. Finally I decided to end whatever looking-for-exotic-animals-in-the-yard game they were playing and give them a bedtime snack and story. Everything was going wrong for Jake; he couldn’t spear blueberries with his fork without them squishing, he couldn’t decide on a story, he wanted to take toys into the bath but didn’t know what toys to take, he decided to take some superheroes and the entire box of superheroes slipped out of his hands, contents scattered on the floor. Then, while he was bathing, I made the grave mistake of letting Mark practice his reading with a Cars book. I heard a bloodcurdling scream from the bathtub and rushed in to see. “I’M MISSING STORIES!”

Sigh. When he finally got into bed – about 45 minutes earlier than normal – he passed out in seconds. I felt like I was out of touch with the tantruming world, I forgot what an overtired preschooler could be like. Do you know what I mean? Fortunately we are not having any more babies. I was using parenting muscles that I forgot I had; those muscles were sluggish and weak, but thankfully, as I discovered on Saturday, they are still there.

YAAAA-HOOOOOO!

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That’s what we say here in Calgary during Stampede time. For those of you who know Calgary, yes, I realize it is only June. BUT the kids’ school had a year-end party in the form of a Stampede Breakfast. For those of you who do not know Calgary, essentially in July during the Stampede everywhere you turn there are free pancake breakfasts complete with entertainment of varying quality. Also the entire city dons western wear, which can be a terribly frightening thing. I remember back in the day when I worked, certain colleagues – who just seemed like regular people – would show up to work wearing skintight Wranglers and shirts emblazoned with pictures of wolves howling at the moon, or a desert landscape at sunset. I’m not judging this particular style, although it is not my fashion cup of tea, but what I found alarming was that my regular, seemingly normal co-workers had whole other lives, ones that involved a lot of cowboy fantasies. A male colleague confessed that he had many, many sexual fantasies involving, of all things, rodeo trick riders and barrel racers. Two things: that is far too much information to have about someone with whom I had a working relationship, and also, I had no idea that rodeo competitors were a source of fantasy. I just didn’t know. I mean, schoolgirls, nurses, flight attendants…but trick riders? Someone might as well have told me that quantitative analysts were the bomb, that would have been just as startling. I was just totally taken aback by that information, and by the fact that a Stampede party and the accompanying drinks led to my reception of that information.

However, now that I’m not working, I’m always up for a good Stampede party, even one in June. The sun came out just in time; my kids could care less about the actual food, but there was a DJ who was playing such songs as YMCA and Who Let the Dogs Out. Who can stop their dancing feet with those tunes? I certainly cannot, and neither, apparently, can my kids:

Mark’s checking out the crowd, Jake is getting jiggy with it.


Mark’s starting to get into it.


Mark looks deflated. Jake is still grooving.


Maybe he was just resting. Check out the sweet moves! Jake, apparently, is embarking on his very own chicken dance.


This may be my all-time favourite picture of Mark. And really, is there anything better than disco dancing at 8:30 in the morning? Given my love of dancing and also my love of going to bed early, I can say with authority that it was a perfect party.

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.

T = Valentine’s + Four

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Since we were on! vacation! last week, the boys missed their class Valentine parties, and so came home yesterday bearing their “mailboxes” stuffed with cards and candies and miniature Play-Doh’s, causing me a little anxiety for only sending plain old Spiderman Valentines. Remember when there were no rules regarding the handing out of Valentines, and the class party would result in a ruthless popularity contest, what with the obsessive counting of cards received and from whom, and the select group of children who would be dejectedly looking at empty mailboxes, save for those given by children forced by their mothers to address cards for the entire class? That kind of sucked.

Also, there wasn’t quite the Valentine selection back then as there is now, with the wide variety of Disney/ Marvel Comic/ Nick Jr. cards, as well as all the add-ons of stickers, tattoos, and individually wrapped chocolate hearts. Although I will admit that the ultimate Valentine’s gift for me would be one of those retro cards stating “Let’s BEE Friends” complete with a picture of a bumblebee.

From the above statement, it is probably obvious that I’m not a person who really celebrates Valentine’s, in the romantic way anyway, since I love making heart-shaped sugar cookies and eating chocolate kisses. Also, this is the first year that one of my children (JAKE) actually made me a Valentine of his own volition, making it a very special day indeed. But normally I am not a Valentine’s person. In earlier years I would have probably railed against it as some kind of commercial made-up holiday, or some such other completely unique and original idea. Mostly I could just care less about it, maybe because I’m not interested in diamonds or a bouquet of roses, and if I received a giant heart-shaped box of chocolates I would probably down it in one sitting, so it’s best to just leave Valentine’s to the Valentine’s people.

But I did do something special this year. This year I was on! vacation! and I decided that day to go shopping to stores that are not available at home.

As an aside, for all you Canadian readers, remember when it was a huge deal to go shopping in the States, and you could get all sorts of strange and wonderful items not available in Canada? I remember the first time I had a Twinkie. It was gross and weird and highly over-rated, but still I enjoyed it because I couldn’t get them in Canada.

Back to the shopping. I decided, on Valentine’s Day of all days, to go to Victoria’s Secret. People, if you are looking for entertainment, go to Victoria’s Secret on Valentine’s Day. It was packed with men who had evidently forgotten the importance of the date or who just, disastrously, left things to the last minute. They ranged in lingerie-temperament from those who rifled furiously through the various racks to those who just stood staring, clearly overwhelmed with the whole undertaking. Some of the more self-aware approached the counter to announce that they had no idea what to look for, so maybe a gift certificate would be in order?

For any men who may be reading this, I am going to go out on a limb here and say that lingerie is possibly the most deadly, land-mine like gift you can give a woman. Size is the first issue: what man really knows what size his wife or girlfriend is? It’s a tricky one; if you go too small, then the item will be horribly uncomfortable and it will be an awkward exchange. If you go too large, then your wife or girlfriend will be tremendously offended that you thought THAT was her size. Also, and this may be a generalization, but I believe that most men have different lingerie tastes than women do. Otherwise, how to explain the proliferation of tacky red-and-black numbers with feathers and fake fur and matching mule slippers? I can only guess that it is for the desperately-seeking-a-Valentine-gift market.

What do you think? Are you a Valentine’s person? An anti-Valentine’s person? Or are you like me, someone who enjoys Valentine-related treats, but not much else about the holiday?

Here’s me, a few hours after my V-Day shopping spree, with 2/3 of my Valentines.

New Year, New Me?

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There’s nothing quite like a fresh start, is there? I think that’s why New Year’s resolutions are so tempting. A New Year – A New You. Each and every time I open my mailbox, it is full of flyers from various companies salivating over Resolution People and their Willingness to Spend Money on Fresh Starts: fitness clubs, diet and nutritional programs, exercise equipment outlets, and health food stores. Today I received a four page flyer advertising various cleanses. Have you ever been on a cleanse? I once tried the Wild Rose 12-Day Cleanse and I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it was one of the poorest decisions of my life. Really, what good can come of a cleanse, unless you exclusively eat KFC, Coke and gummy bears? And if that is your particular diet, then perhaps a cleanse isn’t going to solve all your issues.

But I do understand the concept behind resolutions: there is a feeling of openness, of new beginnings, of unlimited possibilities. I’m just a little cynical about the actual keeping of resolutions, especially when they are of the “complete lifestyle change” variety. People, if I were to make a resolution that said I was going to a) take up jogging, b) eat liver on a daily basis, and c) wear shorty-shorts and crop tops, you can bet that I would also not make it to the middle of January with resolutions kept. I would not likely make it one day.

So what I’m saying is I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions. Which is not to say that my life has no room for improvement. I do tend to make resolutions, but they are more daily resolutions, such as “Today I will play dinosaurs for at least one hour without becoming distracted and needing to leave the room after being violently killed and eaten by my fellow dinosaur players.” Or, “Today I will have a snack prior to picking the kids up at school, rather than simply drinking eight cups of coffee and having a blood sugar crash together with a caffeine high and then becoming incensed after tripping over the backpacks that have been left in the doorway and stepping with my sock foot in a gritty puddle left by the discarded snowboots and screaming at the boys for leaving their things lying around while they are themselves irritable and ready for lunch.” Sometimes I keep those resolutions, and sometimes I do not.

But I did make a New Year’s resolution, and it was to start baking bread. Hold onto your hats! Baking bread! I became inspired after reading this, and thought, I like baking things, and I like bread. What a great resolution!

There is a drawback, however. I bake all the time, I bake cookies and muffins and quick loaves. I bake those things because I like to send them in the boys’ school snack bags. It makes me feel like a Very Good Mother, to send them a snack that I Baked Myself, along with some cut-up Fruits and/or Vegetables. Very Good Mother. Also, no matter how many of those items I bake, I am not overly tempted to actually eat them myself. I can pretty much take it or leave it when it comes to most baked goods. Except fresh baked bread.

I love fresh baked bread; yesterday I made my first loaf of herbed cheese bread, and it was so delicious that I ate piece after piece, fresh from the oven. So, I am wondering, if I keep up with this whole “bake bread” resolution, will that necessitate a “stop eating the bread you bake” resolution? We’ll see.

Goodbye, decade

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Ah, New Year’s. Sometimes New Year’s feels like a bit of a weird competition, what with the fancy parties, and the resolutions, and the staying up until midnight, which is a mighty challenge for me. I tend to react to New Year’s somewhat indifferently. Meh, it’s New Year’s. Tonight I plan on celebrating Newfoundland New Year’s, which means that in Newfoundland it is midnight when it is 8:30 in Calgary. So I’m going to get my party on and still make it to bed by ten. So, if you’re someone who is feeling somewhat bitter about your particular celebration – it’s not quite fancy enough, or exotic enough for the ringing in of not only a new year but a new decade – you can think of my celebration and perhaps feel a bit better?

The truth is I like it that way. Also, it is an enormous improvement on my celebration last year. Last year I – by myself – drank a bottle of red wine, ate a giant plate of nachos, and watched Anne of Green Gables – The Sequel on Access. My husband and the kids were sick, so that’s why the wild solo party.

I wonder if I made any resolutions. I can’t really remember. Maybe I made a whole list and kept them all, and I don’t even know it. I know I accomplished things; for example, I got measured for my actual bra size, and when they picked me up off the floor from the shock of how deflated I am, I bought a bikini. I took both kids to a clay sculpture class, and I survived. I fixed the gutters! I made the world’s worst gingerbread house! So let’s just say that those were my resolutions, and I kept every last one of them.