Category Archives: I love my friends

I WIN!

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I have been having a very stressful and emotional week, and that was even before it became apparent that my stressful and emotional week was exacerbated by the fact that it was coinciding with my monthly stressful and emotional week.  You can imagine the tears and chocolate eating that have been going on around here.  And this is where I make a public service announcement: if you decide to stock up on the new Peppermint Lindor with the intention of passing them out to people in a Santa-like and also join-my-cult-like way, and that stocking up coincides with an emotional and stressful week, you can be assured that you will not pass along any of those Peppermint Lindors but instead you will attempt to consume them all yourself until you resemble Santa in a physical, rather than a metaphorical way. 

That’s how my week was going, so you can imagine my excitement when Kimberly from Make Mommy Go Something Something gave me this:

It’s an award!!  I’ve never received a blog award before!  I feel IRRESISTABLE!  Thanks Kimberly!

It’s Friday, and I’m all T to the G.I.Friday.  I need some laughs, so I stole the idea of “Funny Friday” from my friend Allison over at Bibliomama.  Hey, Allison, you’re irresistable too!  I’m passing that award along to you.

I wish I had the kind of witty, dry, British humour that people tend to associate with intelligence and higher breeding, but unfortunately for me I am Scottish-Norweigan and my sense of humour tends to the low-brow or gutter variety.  Which is to say, this is one of my all-time favourite movie scenes.  That whole movie is filled with many enjoyable moments and lines, such as “We’re going streaking!  Bring your green hat, let’s go!” or “Denver!  The Sunshine State.”  Last weekend I watched You Don’t Mess With The Zohan and, while it wasn’t as funny as one might think a movie about an Israeli commando-turned-hairdresser might be, it did have some good visuals, such as the scene where he goes clubbing wearing cut-off shorts and a silky shirt.  I tried to find that picture but all I found was this:

photo from RottenTomatoes.com

If you have a dog, you may really appreciate this post on moving with two less-than-gifted dogs.  I really could identify with the dog who magically made his own food.  Good times. 

So, if you share my kind of humour, enjoy those links and have a good laugh this Friday! 

Too Much Stuff! Or, why you should consider a charity birthday party.

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A little while ago, my best friend mentioned that her daughter had attended a “charity” birthday party, in which the birthday child had requested donations to a charity in lieu of gifts. This struck me as brilliant. I’ve always wanted to have a big birthday party with lots of guests, but I didn’t want to get the corresponding number of gifts, both from a think-of-the-earth-and-all-those-plastic-toys point of view and also a my-kid-already-has-too-much-stuff-the-spoiled-bastard point of view.

Then a very good friend of mine told me her daughters have birthday parties in which guests bring food bank donations in lieu of gifts and I was completely inspired. (Note: I am also completely inspired by her phenomenal cake-making skills, although my arrangement of miniature plastic animals on green frosting and calling it an African savannah is was somewhat less impressive than her cake that looked exactly like a bag of movie popcorn, or the one that looked like a swimming pool, or the perfect cake-replica of Elmo.)


Seriously, she MADE these. Kind of makes my efforts look a little, um, weak?
Anyway, for Jake’s birthday, we requested guests bring food bank donations, which they did most generously. The key to a successful charity birthday party is to get agreement from your child beforehand, unless you want a resentful little birthday kid. From a young age we have instilled in the boys the idea that they are very lucky, and that there are some children who are not so lucky, and some of those children do not even have enough to eat. Telling Jake that his party would help some of those hungry children was a real selling point for him. We also assured him that he would be receiving gifts – from us, his grandparents, aunts and uncles – just not from his friends. Then we made sure to give him a few things that he really wished for – a certain Bakugan, a Ben 10 Alien, the book The Great Pie Robbery, the latter of which sent my mother on a wild goose chase to a number of book stores. He didn’t miss the gifts at all, and was excited just to have cards that were thoughtfully chosen or made.

There are so many good reasons to have a charity birthday party. Obviously, the charity benefits, but so does the child. In our society, children often have so much that they really can’t appreciate all they have – my children included. From a more selfish point of view, it is MUCH easier on the parents. How many times have you trolled the toy store aisles, wondering what an appropriate gift would be, wondering which book/Barbie/Polly Pocket/superhero/ Star Wars figurine the birthday kid does not already have, only to find out later that the birthday kid already received that exact gift but you forgot to attach a gift receipt so they can’t exchange it? Or maybe that’s just me. Buying some extra groceries is just so much easier. No gift wrap, no waste – it’s perfect.

Look at all the donations! Thank you to Jake’s friends for their wonderful generosity.

I have a bad case of the Fridays!

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Which is to say I’m kind of tired. It has been a long and disjointed week, ending with the kids out of school today due to parent/teacher interviews. My husband was out of town for a couple of days, which always makes for a long, disjointed week. When he told me he was going out of town, my mental reactions were threefold: a) Nooooo…it’s Jake’s birthday, you can’t be away for Jake’s birthday, b) Nooooo…I’m going to miss yoga, and c) Ooh, I can watch When Harry Met Sally and repeat all the dialogue without someone complaining about this being “annoying”. Solo bedtime is not at all difficult these days, with the grave exception of lecturing Mark on rinsing out the giant handful of shampoo he uses for his half-inch long hair, but I still found myself tired out by the end of it.

Also tiring was my attempt at domestic goddess-hood. I just completed baking and frosting two dozen cupcakes for tomorrow’s party. Besides those, in the past five days I have made the following: banana muffins, zucchini loaf, sugar cookies, bread dough, and a birthday cake. My whole life is revolving around baked goods, plus my regular meal preparation. In addition, I have made three separate trips for groceries, including an anxiety attack-inducing trip to Costco. It’s all about food around here, apparently.

Then, there was today’s extremely misguided shopping trip at Wal-Mart. As I mentioned, tomorrow is Jake’s birthday party, and since September is a time of new friendships and classmates, I decided to invite his entire kindergarten class – which sounds more magnanimous than it is, given his small class size. However, not everyone RSVP’d, which is irritating. Still, I felt like that should not bother me – although I did list my email address in the scenario that someone, god forbid, didn’t want to actually speak to me on the phone. I just assumed the non-RSVPers were not attending, but according to Jake, some of them ARE. People! Passing messages through kindergarteners is not a reliable or acceptable method of RSVP. PICK UP THE PHONE. I don’t know their parents or phone numbers, so I can’t check. However, I realized that if those children are attending, then I needed to get a few more environmentally friendly paper bags to make goody bags out of. Hence the last-minute trip to Wal-Mart. At two o’clock in the afternoon on a day where there is no school.

The parking lot was insane. The crowds were insane. When I discovered that they were all out of little paper bags, I felt that the best possible scenario was for me to just lie down on the floor in the aisle and stare at the ceiling for a while. If it were not for the fact that the floor is likely swarming with germs and that I would probably cause some sort of violent shopping-cart rage and get seriously injured, I would have done just that. Instead, I herded my extremely irritable self and my extremely irritable children through the soul-destroying aisles and past the crabby and smelly shoppers to the checkout. In the lineup, I tried hard to breathe deeply and not be bothered by the guy behind me who kept, despite the fact that there was no place to move, inching his cart forward until it was actually touching me. Don’t be upset, I said to myself zen-ly, you’ll be out of here soon, and does it really matter if some mullet-wearing guy who reeks of garlic and cigarettes is invading your personal space? In the grand scheme of things, does it matter? Then I came home and stared blankly at the wall for a while.

Fortunately my neighbour is celebrating her birthday tonight and has invited me over for a margarita (or several). I could really use one, it would seem.

E-evil Children!

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It’s been a weird few days at my house; for example, yesterday it appeared that my children were auditioning for the role of worst children ever. Well, maybe not the worst children ever, I mean, they were not setting the house on fire or stealing the minivan for a joyride, but they were crabby and irritable all day. It was one of those days that I had actually set everything aside to just play with and enjoy them, and it turned out that they were just evil, and I felt kind of resentful in a “What is the matter with you, you ungrateful bastards” kind of way. Every single thing ended up in an argument, or tears, or very vocal unhappiness. I was ready to call it a day and start the bedtime ritual, but it was only 2:00 in the afternoon, so the day wore on. They did end up going to bed early and then slept for a solid hour longer than normal, waking up as their normal cheery selves, so perhaps that explains things.

I remember when the kids were small and they would have days of supreme irritability, and I would think that maybe they just had some kind of psychotic personality change, and then the following day they would come down with fevers or a cough, and I would feel badly that I wasn’t more patient. The children weren’t evil, they were just getting sick. So in that vein, I suppose that yesterday the children were not possessed by the devil, they were just tired.

So today, well rested, we headed out to the Market Collective where my friend was selling his fabulous bread. Remember him? He and his lovely girlfriend are back from their international jet-setting, bread baking, and filmmaking which is fantastic for me, but maybe less fantastic for my ability to zip my jeans, since I rapidly consumed five slices of sourdough in a row. My husband was slightly suspicious – “Market Collective sounds so socialist. Can’t they just call it a market?” – but it was very fun and filled with lovely arty things. Also there were two giant boxes filled with sand and sand toys, which the boys immediately began to dig in, and which I later learned was an art installation. That made me somewhat uncomfortable – are kids allowed to play with the installations? – but no one complained, so I guess that was okay.

Despite the fact that I told my husband that going to a collective would now qualify him as a hippie, he also seems to be his normal self, which is good, as he has gone on record to say that every single thing wrong with society today can be tied to what he refers to as the hippie generation. Or those damn hippies. Lately I’ve been seeing all these posts about being a hippie mama, and what that entails, and how to tell if you are one. My very strong feeling is that LABELS ARE VERY WRONG AND ARE DIVISIVE, NOT INCLUSIVE. Also, sadly, I like wearing makeup and shaving and waxing too much to be included in the hippie mama culture.

Do you ever label yourself? I find my own personal parenting style is made up of numerous types of parenting styles, and I like it that way. Of course, as I write this, my children are playing a game which entails them taking turns soaking their heads in the bathroom sink, then playing air guitar in front of my full-length mirror, despite the fact that there is no music actually playing right now, so what do I know, really, except that things seem to be happily back to normal.

There goes the garden

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Q: What’s better than a good friend?
A: A good friend who has kids that get along with your kids.

Today a friend and I took our kids to an amusement park, which my poor deprived children had never visited before. In fact, not only had they never visited that amusement park, which is located less than thirty minutes from my house, they had never in their lives visited any amusement park. One huge benefit of depriving your children of childhood delights is that they are incredibly excited to finally partake in them. They were so! thrilled! with all the various rides and games and cotton candy, which they had never before tasted. Since coming home, they have incessantly discussed the roller coaster, the log ride, and have eaten their way through a giant bag of cotton candy. They also enjoyed the little airplane ride.

So we had a fabulous time, until the sky turned black and the thunder started. We left the park for home, and returned just before this happened:

What’s that on the ground? Hail.


That was my pretty new rosebush.

Stitches and Disney and Snow in Late May

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This is a photo of my backyard this morning:


What’s that on the ground? SNOW! And what are all those buckets in the background? They are covering up my poor, non-frost-tolerant flowers that I planted on Tuesday. And why would I plant non-frost-tolerant flowers prior to June in Calgary? Because I am stupid, evidently. I probably cursed the city by planting impatiens on May 25. Sorry everyone. I guess the snow is my fault.

Nonetheless, I’m very hap-hap-happy today so I’m going to share some random, somewhat amusing things.

1. Today during my yoga practice I accomplished something that I have been working on for…I don’t even know how long. A year? More than that? A very long time. I accomplished it and then I felt somewhat startled, not unlike the ONE TIME I actually caught a ball in my two years of playing slo-pitch in university. But, I did it! I did it! I really did it!

2. Disney should have a warning on their movies for sensitive children. Like, rated G but with extremely sad and tragic scenes. Appropriately for the weather I watched The Ice Age with the kids and Mark was completely devastated several times. What is with Disney movies and all the death? Especially all the deaths of mothers and other family members?

3. My husband had the day off work and we took the kids out for lunch. The extremely low frequency with which we take the children to restaurants is never more obvious when they cheer at getting TWO STRAWS in their iced teas and that lemon on the side of their glass? “It makes me feel like I’m in Hawaii!” said Mark. We are a simple people.

4. On Tuesday a neighbour – not the Deerhunter, another neighbour – stopped by to see if I had any nurse’s training (I don’t). If so, he thought I could remove his stitches. His stitches! I was completely weirded out by the request, albeit slightly curious as to where the stitches were and why didn’t he go to a doctor? I immediately emailed another neighbour who is also my friend, and we giggled in a horrified way about it. I am convinced my evil giggling was bad karma for me because the incident occurred while I was planting the aforementioned impatiens. Coincidence? I’m sorry everyone. The snow was totally my fault. So sorry.

Advice and judgement

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A few months ago, Catherine Newman ran a contest in which entrants were supposed to share the best piece of parenting advice they had received. Someone wrote that, with respect to infants, it was okay to sometimes feel like throwing the baby out of the window, as long as you don’t actually do it.

A number of years ago there was a particularly horrific local incident involving a young mother – a university student from Japan – who killed her two young children. I was discussing the case with a colleague, an extremely kind and gentle man, a devout church-going family man with a penchant for corny jokes. As we discussed the tragedy, he related that when his eldest was a colicky baby, he and his wife were often at their wits’ end, and that sometimes he felt like throwing her out the window.

This revelation shocked and outraged me, a sheltered, pampered, twenty-five year old non-parent. I couldn’t believe a parent would feel like that about their own child. I couldn’t believe that someone could feel that way and still be a loving, effective parent.

Fast forward several years when I was at home, alone, with a toddler who was not yet two and a colicky, sleepless infant. Sometimes my baby would scream, uninterrupted, for hours regardless of my efforts to feed, rock, and soothe him. Hours. I recall one incident when he cried for five straight hours before exhausting himself, as I walked the floor with him, singing and patting and attempting to feed him, all the while caring for my young toddler, by myself, while my husband was working long hours at the office. I understood completely. I felt like throwing the baby out the window, grabbing the car keys, and making a break for it.

I love my children like any mother does, an all-encompassing love, my greatest fear is that something will happen to them, and yet in the moment, I felt like giving up. I felt that way, me with my loving husband and parents in town and supportive friends, me with no worries about paying rent or putting food on the table, privileged, lucky me. If I could feel that way, how much worse would someone feel who was not fluent in the local language, someone with a deadbeat boyfriend and two young children to care for, someone with no friends and little money.

Perhaps some people will be shocked and outraged and think that I am a monster, but perhaps some will recall moments when they felt they were at the breaking point, and how easy it is to become perilously close to a tragic result. It’s the easiest thing in the world to pass judgement.