Category Archives: Fleeting Time

My Favourite Cup

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The handle broke off of my favourite mug a couple of weeks ago.  It was a tall, lidded, blue ceramic cup with flowers on it that I had received in a gift basket from my husband’s colleagues when Mark was born.  I have used this mug every day since then, and now it is broken.  This feels like a metaphor for something but it isn’t.  It’s just a mug.

It is sad how attached I am to this mug, and it’s also sad that I went through several folders of digital pictures to see if my mug would be pictured in the background somewhere.  Since this mug was part of my everyday life and a large contributor to my caffeine habit, one would think that there would be photographic evidence of it but no.  I spent some minutes going through old pictures, becoming increasingly nostalgic as I looked at my children’s baby pictures.  My children, who have – not including today, when Jake is possibly being trampled by rampaging peacocks and escaped wild animals on his zoo trip as I write this – only two days of school left. 

I’m not at all melancholy about Mark leaving Grade One, but Jake leaving kindergarten?  I’m very mixed.  On the one hand, he’s such a big kid now, no more half days and missing his brother all afternoon, no more freezing to death in the playground where we while away the twenty five minutes between Jake’s and Mark’s lunchtime dismissals.  On the other hand, no more Mother’s Day spa treatments, no more performances of Robin in the Rain complete with air trumpets, no more adorable kindergarten program. 

But!  We cannot get caught up in it.  We must soldier on, bravely watching our kids get bigger and bigger and enjoying it.  Speaking of enjoying the changes, my husband thought that it would be a nice idea to get each boy a small gift for end of year celebrations, and for Jake, that meant fulfilling a several-months-long dream of obtaining a Lego NinjaGo Turbo Shredder.  He ordered it online and Jake waited and waited and WAITED and looked out the front door several times a day and FINALLY it arrived. 

I did not think, quite frankly, that Jake would survive the rest of the day if we waited for his father to get home to build it.  I thought he might spin off the planet.  So I took a deep breath and went outside my comfort zone and decided to build it myself.

People.  I am not exaggerating, not even a little, when I say that there were moments that I looked at the gigantic pile of Lego pieces in front of me and the thick instruction manuals on the floor and I thought of lying on the floor and saying “Bring Mom that wine bottle over there.”  But I did not.  I did not.  Two hundred and ninety eight pieces, two instruction manuals, and ninety minutes of intense focus and concentration and we now have a Turbo Shredder.  I listened to my seventies’ radio station and hummed and sang along, trying to maintain a calm exterior.  You’re having my baby!  Where the fuck am I supposed to put this brick?  What a lovely way to say how much you love me. Is this supposed to be on the third or fourth hole?  You’re having my baby!   Dammit, that was supposed to be a black piece, not a grey one.

But!  There was one missing piece, which turned out to be a crucial piece because the Turbo Shredder is missing one of its tires.  I looked and looked and swept under the couch and moved furniture and we still have one missing piece.  Did you know that you can contact Lego and have them send you any missing pieces?  YOU CAN.

After finishing this project, I felt as though I deserved much more accolades and perhaps even a parade in my honour but somehow that did not happen.

When my mug broke, I received two offers of redemption from my children.  Jake said that if I drove him to the store, he would use his allowance to buy me a new mug.  Mark said that he would register himself in a clay class and sculpt me one.  I hugged them for both of those suggestions and then dug through my cupboards to find an old, unused travel mug.  I went to take a shower and then I came back to see that Jake had taken a Sharpie to it.

“I Love You” he had written in his shaky, kindergarten printing.  That’s better than a parade, I think.

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He shoots, he scores!

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How was your weekend?  The boys had each made an adorable card for their dad – Mark’s with a picture of a tiger saying “I Roar You” and Jake’s in the shape of a shirt with a tie – and in addition to a couple of purchased gifts, my husband also received a jar of barbeque sauce that Jake had made in the kindergarten class, which lent a certain je ne sais quois to our hamburger/ bean burger dinner.  I also skipped my morning yoga class so that my husband could book an earlier tee time – normally he schedules his golf around my yoga, which is very convenient, I think – and I found myself wondering is this what Sunday mornings are like?  My, the children are loud and needy.

Perhaps the loudness and the neediness came from the kind of exhaustion that results from Super! Soccer! Saturday!  The boys each played two games, none of which overlapped, so we were at the soccer field from 8:20 until 1:00.  That sounds pretty benign until I tell you that the field was swept by the kind of winds that topple unattended lawn chairs and that the temperature hovered around 10 degrees without the wind.  At least it’s not raining we frozen spectators kept saying to each other.  Jake’s coaches were wearing toques and gloves; I myself had three sweaters on underneath my fall coat, along with lined rain boots.

They are going to blow away!

Only seven players from Mark’s team were in attendance, meaning that each player was on the field almost constantly, running and sweating and, ultimately, going to the food table to get freezies and slushies while I fantasized about hot tubs and Bailey’s and coffee. 

I keep waiting for summer to arrive, pinning my hopes on the appearance of summer-like temperatures, and I think I need to just come to accept the fact that it will never be summer.  If I lower my expectations enough, perhaps I will be happy and satisfied because at least it isn’t snowing.

I just looked out the front window to see my seven year old helping my husband mow the lawn.

Years ago the boys had little popper lawn mowers that they would noisily run around with while my husband mowed the lawn.  Now they are both allowed to push the mower for short distances, and it won’t be long before mowing the lawn will be their job entirely.  I was speaking with a friend today and we both talked about how our lives were revolutionalized the day that our kids were able to get dressed, use the bathroom, brush their teeth and wash their faces with no assistance.  The days of last-second diaper changes and flailing temper tantrums while dressing and forcing toothbrushes between clenched jaws were behind us, forever.  My kids are learning how to mow the lawn, for goodness’ sake, what’s next?

Happy Father’s Day, honey.  Thanks for slipping a couple past the goalie!  Wait – too soon after the Canucks’ loss? 

Floral Update and Rockin’ the Bump

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Did I leave you hanging?  Are you dying to find out what happened?  All weekend were you wondering: Nicole, please tell us about your clematis, PLEASE?

Well, I will tell you – the clematis is just fine.  I repeat, the clematis is just fine.



Mere hours after my last post I received a call from one of the meter movers, who was standing in the alley watching my fluffy dog barking ferociously and wagging his tail frantically.  When it was discovered that the city hadn’t phoned me about the prep work that they had to do, the foreman seemed to get very upset.  It was no problem, I said, I was home, they could do the prep work, but would they mind showing me just where they had to dig the hole?  Because I was a bit concerned about safety, with regards to the kids and the dog.  The foreman nodded, then said forcefully, “Before you say anything, let me tell you something: I am not going to hurt your flowers.  Okay?  No one is going to kill your flowers.”


Okay!  I’m not sure if my thoughts are actually that transparent or if he had just had to deal with every elderly woman on my street concerned with her petunias, but in any case I felt relief.  I did not have to resort to crying or any other questionable practices, although coincidentally it was a warm day and I was wearing a low cut tank top.  Perhaps the take-away lesson in all this is that one should always wear a low cut tank top because you never know what a day is going to bring.  It is akin to my reasoning behind my rule of always wearing makeup, because you never know who you might run into.  This rule stemmed from me running into an ex-friend who became an ex-friend when she pronounced her affection for my then-boyfriend who later became her husband.  When a person runs into someone like that, the person wants to look as good as possible, no?   

Last Friday was our school’s annual Stampede Breakfast and the weather was, oddly enough, sunny and perfect.  It made for a great day for all those dressed to kill in the Wild West:

Don’t they look thrilled to be there?  I promise you, they were.
When I look at pictures of them now, they seem like such big kids.  I can barely remember life without them, and due to all the hormonal involvement, I can barely remember my pregnancies.  However, I’m linked up with Shell today for her Rockin’ the Bump, so I’m walking down memory lane via pregnancy photographs.  Who doesn’t want to look at themselves with an extra seventy-plus pounds? 

This picture was taken New Year’s Day, and my due date was March 30, so you can just imagine how big I actually got.  I was working at the time with a lot of men, and there are good things to say to pregnant women and bad things to say to pregnant women.  Good things: You look fabulous, You are glowing, Your hair looks great.  Bad things: Oh my god, you haven’t had the baby yet?  You look like you’re going to explode, Are you sure there aren’t twins in there? (question inevitably followed by an incredible-yet-true story of a friend of a friend who thought she was having just one baby but then ended up having multiples, this despite many ultrasounds because ultrasounds can be wrong), What happened to Nicole?  Did you eat her? 
All those things were said to me, including the one in which I was accused of somehow cannibalizing myself; I’m pretty sure the guy who said that to me is still single. 
Eeep!  I’m huge!  And I have seven weeks to go in this picture.  I can’t bear to post any pictures closer to the due date because they all involve me sitting hugely on the couch with my feet elevated because I was on bedrest due to my development of pre-eclampsia.  I also had to test my own urine for protein every morning, which was pretty gross at the time, but in retrospect, no big deal.

This is one of my favourite pictures from my pregnancy with Jake.  Mark was just fourteen months in this picture, and I was five months pregnant.  There’s something about having children really close together that gives you a kind of street credit.  Wow, everyone says, you’re going to have your hands full!  You think?  I don’t even really remember the first two years of Jake’s life, so I guess I pretty much had my hands full.

This is me about three weeks before Jake was born, which was actually FIVE weeks before his due date.  Haven’t you had that baby yet? people would ask.  Around this time I put Mark in his stroller and walked to the Starbucks down our street.  It is, at most, a ten minute walk but in my waddle-y pregnant state it took me forty five minutes.  The glamour of pregnancy, when you feel like the baby might actually fall right out of your vagina if you walk too quickly. 
If you would like to play along and post some pictures, head on over to Shell’s and link up!  Or tell me here what you loved about being pregnant, what you hated about being pregnant, what kind of foods you craved or loathed….it will be fun! 

Just This

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On Friday Jake’s kindergarten class had a Mother’s Day Spa Day, in which all the moms brought in deck chairs and lounged in the darkened classroom to the sound of soothing spa music while their five year olds rubbed lotion into their feet, rubbed their shoulders, and brushed their hair.  After untangling the brushes from our hair, we were treated to manicures.
Lovely!  The photos don’t quite do it justice. 
In addition to the spa day, Jake also gave me a “hug book” filled with pictures and sweetly phonetically spelled sentences about me (“My mom is so pritte and wundrfl.”) as well as a very scented lilac made out of purple tissue paper.  Mark, not to be outdone, made a construction paper card with a picture of an elephant on it – my favourite wild animal! – and we all went out for brunch at my husband’s golf course.  My ego got a boost when my husband told me that I got “checked out”, and my ego only deflated a small amount when I discovered that the man “checking me out” was close to seventy.  A lovely day, and a lovely end to the weekend, which was slightly marred by all the nocturnal coughing being done by Mark. 
Each year I remind myself that Mother’s Day is not a day that is met with fanfare and celebration by all, despite the many commercials implying that failure to purchase flowers, jewelry, or spa gift certificates will result in a direct trip to hell in a handbasket, or at the very least, will show your mother/wife that you don’t actually love or appreciate her.  Mother’s Day, while a joyful and lovely day for me, can be terrible for some.  For those who are estranged from or have strained relations with their mothers, for those suffering infertility, for those who have lost a mother, wife, or child, Mother’s Day can be complicated and painful, and I try to remember that with sensitivity each year.  I once stumbled on a website that discussed all the ways family members had disappointed their mothers on Mother’s Day, from forgetting altogether to not getting the lavish gifts that these women had anticipated.  Reading the stories, I felt the same way that I felt when I found out about “push presents”; a feeling along the lines of you are missing the point. 
When the boys were babies, and my days were filled with chaos and crying, diapers and drudgery, all marked with vast underlying exhaustion, the gift I wanted most for Mother’s Day was just a few hours to myself.  I wanted a few hours of silence, of time to do anything I wanted to do without someone crying or asking me for something or fetching a snack or feeding someone or having a small person stuck on my body like a barnacle to a ship.  And now every day I have long stretches of time to myself, whole mornings of complete silence and solitude, hours to run errands alone.  Those days that seemed endless have ended.  This is such a golden time, this time of crafts and drawings and uninhibited hugs, and I know it too will end one day.  I look at my boys and this life that I never thought I wanted but now I see that it is perfect for me, and I can’t believe my good fortune.

Just this.

Wake me up when September ends

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Last Friday I realized that there was going to be a joint family birthday celebration on the weekend for Jake and my dad, and, like always, I needed to buy a gift for my dad.  For some reason I always, always leave his birthday gift for the last minute, and then make a panicked rush to the mall where I wonder what to get a sixtyish man who has everything, and end up buying the same splash aftershave that I always buy.  This is exactly what I did last Friday, and when I got home I opened a drawer to find the golf shirt I bought for him a month before in an effort to bypass my usual end-of-September panicked mall rush.  I guess I can cross him off my Christmas list, that is, if I remember.
While I was at the mall I decided, in addition to purchasing evidently redundant birthday gifts, I needed to look for a pair of jeans.  My stay-at-home mom uniform consists of jeans, and a couple of my standbys are getting quite threadbare.  So I popped into a jean store, spotted a super-perky eighteen year old salesgirl, and said, like a hip Betty White, “I need some jeans that will make my butt look really good!”  She nodded earnestly and said seriously “I totally understand.  I have a really bad butt too.”  Hm.  That wasn’t exactly the response I expected.  I was still a little congested, so I stood there for a moment wondering if perhaps I had misheard her – after all, who would actually say that – but I couldn’t, and still can’t, figure out what might had been said instead. 
As an aside, any of my girlfriends to whom I have related this story have reacted with appropriate horror, but my husband seems to have taken a peculiar blame-the-victim stance, saying that I shouldn’t have asked for something to improve the look of my butt as that implies that I do, indeed, have a bad butt.  So it’s really my fault, in his view, and the salesgirl was just trying to help.  I do not think I agree with this assessment.
Anyway, maybe my bad-butt bonding with the salesgirl was actually beneficial, because she brought me the most comfortable and flattering jeans that I have ever worn.  I’m wearing them right now as a matter of fact.  However, before she brought me my new favourite jeans, she brought me a pair of skinny jeans, just for “fun”.  Against my better judgement, I tried them on.  I had a small self-esteem crisis right there in the change room.  Not only were they terribly unflattering, but they were also an unwelcome and unnecessary reminder of the Flight of Time, since they strongly resembled jeans I wore over two decades ago.  Remember safety pinning the ankles of your jeans?  Or rolling them tightly?  Or – if you had a mother who knew her way around a sewing machine, as I did – having them sewn tightly along the calf and ankle?  Yeah.
Never again.  After this debacle, someone told me that the Gap sells skinny jeans that are, apparently, awesome, so I looked them up on their website.  That’s when I saw these.  Stirrup jeans!!  Stirrups!  I never thought I would see the day, I tell you.  Flight of Time indeed.

NOT crazy. Just hormonally deranged.

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The first day of school went great, so I will not bore you with the details. Instead, allow me to tell you what happened on the last day of summer vacation.

It was cold and rainy. I thought a fun activity would be to print out invitations for Jake’s birthday and then have the kids decorate them, which was quite inspired except that the printer was not working. After an hour of online troubleshooting I had to make a decision: just let it go and get on with life or call the technical assistance line. I made the phone call.

Just to interrupt the narrative, it is imperative that you understand – if you do not already know this about me – that I am a crier. I cry for most emotions but especially for frustration and anger. The reader can well imagine how poorly suited I was to working in an open area trade floor, an environment in which I would frequently be sworn at (“This fucking model you made is a piece of shit. It doesn’t fucking update.” “Did you press the update button?” “I shouldn’t have to press a fucking BUTTON. It should just fucking update automatically! FUCK!” Cue crying.) After searching for printer related answers and then being transferred three times, I was very frustrated.

So by the time the final technical support person answered, I was sobbing hysterically. This may seem like an overreaction to the matter at hand and so it was. Perhaps was I a) expressing repressed emotions at the end of school, b) going crazy at last, or c) getting my period? If you answered c), ding ding ding!

I was, at this point, crying so hard I couldn’t speak, but instead was gasping out my printing issues. The technical support person was very soothing. “Ma’am, I will stay on the line if you need a moment to collect yourself. Ma’am, perhaps you would like a drink of water? Ma’am, you just relax now. I am going to take care of everything.” Poor guy. I mean, his job must pretty much suck. He’s a technical support person at a call centre. Probably the premenstrually deranged lunatic was the best call he’d had all day. Probably he deals mostly with irate people demanding to know why their screens were blank, when in fact they hadn’t turned their monitors on, or people screaming about their crappy printers, when in fact their printers weren’t plugged in. At least I was polite, if unintelligible.

My technical support person and I spent one hundred and five minutes on the phone before he came to the conclusion that my printer issue was strange enough to warrant a brand new printer, which actually arrived today, to which I say that is some good customer service. I wonder if crying had anything to do with it. It has never helped me in getting out of speeding tickets, probably because I could win an award for Least Attractive Crier: blotchy, red, and swollen. In any case, I was completely astonished by the result and thanked him many, many times. “You are welcome. Again. All right now, ma’am. Ma’am? Yes, you are welcome. All right, now you have a nice day!”

The rest of the day I felt like I had a hangover, from crying so much. With that stunning denouement to the summer, I was all ready for school today.


Too cool for school. Only after they chose their outfits and I had taken the picture and dropped them at school did I realize that they wore those exact same shirts on the first day of school last year. MOM FAIL.