Category Archives: I’m turning into Howard Hughes

Well, hello there, stranger!

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How have you been?  I’ve been away.  I just spent a week with my in-laws, and I ONLY have nice things to say.  We had fabulous weather, we had lots of fun, and I discovered something about myself: I am naturally a rigid and rule-oriented person (this is not part of my self-discovery; I knew that already) but with effort, I can be very easy-going.  I KNOW.  I also realized that by only reacting agreeably to anything that I may have, in the past, taken in a hurtful or negative way, not only diminishes the effect of hurtful and/or negative comments, but it also diminishes the frequency of such comments!  Do you see what I’m saying here?  It’s a miracle of epic proportions!  You know that saying that no one can hurt your feelings without your permission?  Well, I actually think that saying is bullshit.  I mean, take it from the flip side – does that mean we all have license to act like total assholes, and if someone is hurt by our actions, we can simply say that they allowed themselves to be hurt?  I don’t fucking think so.  But I’m here to tell you, in a modified way, that we really, truly, cannot control what others do but we can control our own reactions and behaviour. 

You know what else makes a person calm and easy-going?  Booze and saturated fat.  Just try it; right now, drink three beers in rapid succession, eat half a bag of potato chips, and just see how relaxed you become.  Easy like Sunday morning, I’m telling you.  You will not be bothered by endless conjectures concerning who, exactly, your children take after, or why, exactly, you still get blemishes at age 37.  Who cares!  Another beer?  Yes please!

The kids were astonished by my new persona, who they dubbed Vacation Mom.  Vacation Mom buys potato chips at the grocery store, Vacation Mom allows them to eat Aero bars at 9:30 in the morning, Vacation Mom even went down the waterslides and got her hair all wet at the water park.  Vacation Mom is a lot of fun, but sadly, she’s dead now.  Regular Mom is back.  Regular Mom is also very tired and somewhat brain dead.

This is how my day has been: up at 4:45 to pack up the car, on the road at 5:45.  Drive for seven hours and fifteen minutes, which includes two short stops.  We made “great time”.  Do you have a spouse, or are you yourself someone who loves to make “good time”?  Before we left, my husband and I were talking to a friend who had just made a similar road trip to us, and she mentioned all the places on the way she liked to stop with her kids to break up the drive.  My husband and I both looked at her nonplussed.  We never want to break up the drive.  We always want to just get there already, dammit.  Clearly we are not those “the journey is half the fun” people.  We’re all about the destination.  This surely is some kind of metaphor about our lives but I’m too tired to make the metaphoric leap.

Once we got home we discovered we had an ANT INFESTATION – it was less of an infestation, really, and more of a “the ants have found their way in through a teeny crack in the foundation” but yet I had a slight ant-related meltdown.  Fortunately my husband is very, very good at dealing with such matters, and we seem to have things under control.  I have seen nary an ant over the past two hours.  I unpacked, cleaned things frantically, did a mountain of laundry – despite doing laundry every single day on vacation – purchased groceries not of the potato chip variety, and then, in a stunning climax to this weird day, stabbed myself in the foot with my nail scissors.  I mean, I really stabbed myself.  I am wearing a Hello Kitty bandage as we speak.

This, too, feels somewhat like a metaphor, but I’m TIRED.  I have much to say about vacation, and about the lovely bloggy award that my dear, dear friend Hannah gave me – my bloggy bestie – and about how my dog now has the whitest teeth after consuming approximately, and not exaggeratedly, one hundred Milk Bones over the past seven days.  But I’m exhausted, and I need a shower, and I sure hope said shower gets that creepy-crawly ant-infestation feeling. 

So tell me, lovies, how was your week? xo

It’s Coming From Inside The House!

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How was your weekend?  Normally my weekends are fairly uneventful, but this weekend was the exception to the rule.  A while back, the CBC was having a fundraiser for the Calgary Food Bank, and my girlfriends and I managed to purchase an evening with local celebrity and food goddess extraordinaire Julie van Rosendaal, from Dinner with Julie!  Squee!  It was so much fun.  There’s nothing like drinking wine and hanging with the girls, am I right?  The thing is, it never really happens much.  Friday nights normally see me in my pajamas, drinking wine on the couch – and during the golf season, often that means I’m drinking wine on the couch by myself, watching NYPD Blue, which is a teensy bit depressing once I see that written down.  So, it was so much fun – we all dressed up a little bit, and I think we probably startled Julie with our zeal (WE LOVE YOU, JULIEEEEEE!).  Although, my girlfriend who hosted mentioned to me this morning that she could see me visibly fade after nine o’clock, and I was the first person to mention that it was now time to go home.  Could she blame me?  By ten o’clock I had been up for over seventeen hours, and after a few glasses of wine…zzzzzz….

Saturday dawned grey and rainy; of course – it was Super Soccer Saturday!  There’s nothing quite like having a soccer tournament in the pouring rain.  Fortunately the rain tapered to a drizzle and eventually let up.  Unfortunately the field in places was just completely sodden.  The kids had fun, I had enough layers and rain wear on that I didn’t freeze, and my life as a soccer mom is now over, so happiness all around.

How can you resist such a face?  He is also my hero of the day, and here’s the story.  First, I need you to understand, dear reader, that a phobia is a phobia.  Some of us have fears that may or may not have grounding in reality.  They may seem unreasonable or silly to others, but they are very real to the phobic person.  I have a phobia of moths.
They are such freaky things, and they flutter so spastically.  I am TERRIFIED of them, and as far as I can tell they do nothing of particular merit in the insect world.  They are just gross and ugly and I hate them the end.  Anyway, since we have been having work done on the house, the doors are frequently left open, and on Saturday afternoon I was calmly cleaning up the kitchen from lunch and a MOTH FLUTTERED RIGHT IN MY FACE AND THEN FLUTTERED AROUND THE SINK.  I don’t know what you would do in that situation, but what I did was scream my husband’s name over and over at the top of my lungs.  His lack of response then spurred me to run down the stairs, where the kids were very calmly playing and were disturbingly not at all bothered by my hysterical screaming.  “Where’s your dad where’s your DAD?” I shrieked, not waiting for them to answer before I burst into the bathroom where he was showering, effectively putting him into cardiac arrest.  By the time he dried off (slowly) and made his way upstairs, the moth was nowhere to be found.
The only thing worse than having a moth in the house is not knowing the whereabouts of said moth.
“It could be anywhere!” I whispered to my husband, as he walked from room to room, looking.  The moth was nowhere to be found.  A guy was actually working on our bathroom at the time, a huge and quiet guy referred to universally as “D”.  My husband explained the situation to the somewhat bewildered fellow, who reassured me that he hadn’t seen a moth, but if he did, he would squish it immediately.  After a while, my husband gave up the search, although I continued to creep suspiciously from room to room.  “It must have made its way outside!” he said cheerfully, although I thought, darkly, that he was saying this to placate me. 
This morning the moth showed up.  It must have hidden under the food processor.  I moved it out of the way to plug in the blender this morning, when the moth made its appearance.  I was making a smoothie for Mark’s breakfast, and he was fairly alarmed when I started screaming.  I took a deep breath, told him I needed him to be really brave, and to get the moth.  He grabbed a tissue, ran to the window where the moth was fluttering, and squished it!  My brave, big boy! 
And here I was, fretting at the speed at which children grow up.  There’s nothing quite so satisfying as having a big kid who can squish moths for me.   

When I say "kind of a dick" I mean in a good way.

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Here’s proof that I have a very confident husband: he was completely unfazed by my shameless male objectification as I ranked the cast members on last night’s Grey’s Anatomy, based on hotness.  For anyone interested, here are my top two:

And here is who I rank at the bottom:
“Too young for you?” my husband asked.  Exactly.  Call me in 20 years, Dr. Avery.  Well, actually, in 20 years I will be almost sixty, so probably my tastes will have altered somewhat.  But theoretically call me in 20 years.
A while back, I heard someone say that if there was a Hooters for women, it would just be men in business suits walking around holding up their impeccable credit scores, and I have to say, that really spoke to me.  If I was to say I had a “type”, it would be an older, salt-and-pepper haired man in a business suit who is kind of a dick, but yet inwardly romantic.  Fortunately my husband fits into this genre.  It would be a bit strange if he didn’t, just as it would be strange if he suddenly announced that he prefers petite blonde women with big breasts, rather than crazy artificial redheads who really like to make lists and drink wine.  Come to think of it, I’m not sure that there are too many other crazy list-making wine-tippling artificial redheads that he is particularly enamoured with, but still.
Last night we watched Grey’s Anatomy and I engaged in sexist behaviour while the snow came down, giant fluffy flakes.  It turns out we had a record snowfall!  Today the snow is melting and the grass is looking much less brown.  Springtime in Calgary!  The wet snow is making the grass greener!  Hooray for giant wet snowfalls!
Another sign that it is springtime, other than the festive April snowshowers, is that my dog is behaving like an imbecile.  I’m guessing this is spring-related, anyway.  Yesterday before the snow I went with some friends and their dogs to the off-leash park.  We walked and chatted, and as we were almost finished our walk, I noticed my dog way behind us, sniffing and happy and rolling enthusiastically in the grass.  When he caught up to us it became evident that not only was he enthusiastically rolling in the grass, he was enthusiastically rolling in some other dog’s poop.  I’m not going to lie to you, people.  I pretty much hated my dog at that moment and in the moments that followed.  I especially hated him as we had driven to the dog park, and the ride home, though brief, was without a doubt the worst olfactory experience I have ever had.  My very good friend who was with me not only rode home in my rancid-o-mobile, but she gave me some no-rinse foamy dog shampoo when I dropped her off.  I can never repay her for this kindness.  I need to buy a case of this no-rinse foamy dog shampoo, to have on hand just in case such a horror ever occurs again.  Did I mention my dog is very fluffy?  Three applications later and he was back to his normal, non-smelly self.  However, it has taken me until now to fully forgive him for being so disgusting. 

It’s a good thing he’s so cute.

If I have to, I can face anything! I am woman!

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I unclogged the gutters today!  I know I’ve written about this before, but every time I perform a job like that, I feel like raising my fist in the air and singing “I am strong – STRONG – I am invincible – INVINCIBLE – I am WOMAN.”  Hear me roar, I unclogged the gutters!

I unclogged the gutters because it’s been steady rain for days now, and I have the overwhelming urge to elbow everyone I see and say something like “Wet enough for you?” or perhaps “Anyone else feel like a duck?”, followed by a grim, humourless laugh.  Fortunately for everyone in my neighbourhood, the rain is slated to stop tonight, saving everyone from my idiocy.

My fierceness in gutter work is in sharp contrast to the other jobs I have done today, which include but are not limited to three loads of laundry, cleaning the bathroom, and baking cupcakes.  Why was I baking cupcakes, one might ask?  It is for a birthday – the DOG’s birthday; because every birthday must be celebrated with cake, even if that cake is non-consumable by the birthday boy.

I also took the kids to get their hair cut at the neighbourhood Beaners, and after a long appointment with some junior, still-in-training stylists, I allowed them to play in the ballpit.  I try very hard to behave like a normal person when my kids play in one of those ballpits; I try not to squirt them with sanitizer every few seconds and I breathe deeply, consciously thinking of other things and not the squeamy little germs covering each and every ball.  I try not to think about Jake’s recent cold and Mark’s recent recovery from pneumonia; I try to let them enjoy this innocent, if gross, childhood pleasure.  Then, as I was at the counter paying for the haircuts, I noticed a woman at the ballpit, speaking very sharply.  I wondered if my kids were involved in whatever the issue was and walked over.  The boys stood in the ballpit, looking alarmed.  The woman was doing that counting thing you do with small children: “Come here Right Now.  One.  Two.  Three.  COME HERE.  HERE!  One.  Two.  Three.  COME HERE NOW.”  Finally she removed her own boots and stepped into the ballpit to extract the small girl.  She turned to the receptionist, who was trying to flag her down to tell her that her children were up for their appointments, and said that she was very sorry, but she had to leave, as her daughter had peed in the ballpit. 

Now, I did feel very sorry for this woman as she hauled her now-screaming daughter out of there.  I smiled sympathetically at her, unsure if I should make a reassuring comment or not, eventually opting for not.  As soon as she turned around I gestured to the boys to exit, discovering on doing so that their socks were soaked.  While I did feel a lot of sympathy about this, I also felt nauseated.  My kids were standing in someone else’s urine.

We went home and the boys changed their clothes and washed their hands and I ate a cupcake and drank some wine and IT DIDN’T HELP.  My kids were playing in a pee pit.  Maybe I need some more wine.  What do you think?

Fake – and Fabulous

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I am sitting right now, seething with anxiety, because my children are both at swimming lessons with their school.  Some of you will know why I am extra anxious this time around, in addition to my usual anxiousness with the kids swimming, and signing those release forms with the school that states that the possibility of injury, dismemberment, and DEATH are all lurking around the corner as the children walk the half block to the swimming pool, not to mention all the dangers in the actual facility.  Some of you might be saying, hey, you’re a stay at home mom and you’re blogging while your children are swimming?  Maybe you should be volunteering to help!  Let me tell you, people, my volunteering at a public swimming pool would not be a good idea, given my penchant for anxiety attacks in public change rooms.  I don’t know when this started; I certainly wasn’t always such a nut, but let’s just leave it at “I don’t volunteer to help at swimming lessons.”
Anyway. 
We’ve had our Christmas tree up for two weeks now.  I live in a fairly small bungalow, and every year the putting up of the tree has required us to move every article of furniture around, including moving some to the basement, just to make space for our five-foot tree.  But this year, we purchased a new tree – a “slim build” – and it is all kinds of awesome.  Check it out!

You can see that it is still kind of wedged between the table and the armchair, but hey.  We didn’t actually have to rearrange the entire floor plan for it – more like just move the table a foot or so.  Decorating the tree is one of my favourite things to do.  The kids pretty much just spin out of control with excitement, we have to lock the dog into his crate because he goes nuts trying to figure out what is with this giant tree and why are the kids so excited, and my husband actually puts the tree together while I sing “Santa Baby” in a slutty kind of voice.  Good times.  We have an artificial tree despite the environmental horror, because three out of four people in this house have allergies and we do like to keep the mucus membranes happy.  I think it looks pretty fabulous, actually.  Here is my favourite part of the tree:

Jake put four of those candy cane ornaments on the same branch, and refused to move any of them because “They are a family!”.  Love that kid. 

This weekend we also lit our strange assortment of outdoor decorations – a moose, a hippo, two penguins, and a miniature tree.  My husband had to do some extensive feats of electrical engineering just to get everything lit, the timer to go on, etc.  It reminded me of one of my very favourite Christmas movies of all time – Christmas Vacation.  “The little lights are not twinkling.” 
All right.  I am still slightly anxious about the swimming but I’m feeling better, so thank you for listening.  I will end with another great line from that movie – a friend reminded me of it – “Holy shit.  Where’s the Tylenol?”

No matter what, you probably did not consume sour milk.

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It’s been a strange week.  If you were to run an ultraviolet light over our house, doubtless there would be an offensive amount of germs and viruses squirming on the surfaces.  I myself came down with a weird 24 hour virus characterized by a high fever and narcolepsy.  After sleeping a lot I felt better.  Then Jake was up in the night vomiting.  There’s nothing quite like the night time vomit.  It puts you on edge the whole night, just waiting for the next episode.  The slightest cough or movement jolts you out of bed.  Then there’s the cleanup.  You strip the bed, you change the pajamas, you wipe down the bathroom, but since it’s the middle of the night and you are a zombie, and also you are comforting a very upset vomiting person, you tend to miss a lot of things that come to view in the harsh morning light.  Ew.  So I have been spending the day in an exhausted cleaning haze, except when I actually lay down on the bed I was remaking and fell asleep.  I woke up with Mark holding a Lego masterpiece right up to my face, talking about it in great deal.  I think he actually thought I was awake the whole time and was too amazed by his Lego skills to answer.
It was a pretty good Lego sculpture, after all.
Because of the vomiting, we decided to cancel our Thanksgiving trip which makes me a bit sad – I was looking forward to fresh grapes and apples – but also a bit relieved because frankly, I am just too tired to spend eighteen hours in the car this weekend.  I’m also a little confused, because I have no idea what to do for Thanksgiving dinner.  I mean, I’m not about to make a turkey or a pie.  But will the kids feel deprived?  Will my husband be deprived?  Should we just go out for dinner?  The pressure is on.  I did buy a butternut squash yesterday.  Maybe I could festively make some soup?
As I write this, Jake asked if we COULD have turkey, even if we are not going to Grandma’s for dinner.  Maybe, he said, we could go catch one.  Mark then joined the conversation by asking if turkeys available at grocery stores are already dead, or do you have to kill them yourselves?  I’m guessing soup might be a disappointment for them.
Further in the chronicles of Things I Would Rather Not Have Happened this week, I attempted, at my husband’s urging, to Keep Up My Strength by eating while sick.  One morning I poured skim milk on my cereal and started eating.  It tasted terrible.  “Everything tastes terrible when you’re sick” my husband admonished, “You just have to eat it and Keep Up Your Strength.”  So I did.  I felt kind of gross, and later I was mixing muffin batter and opened the skim milk.  Although the best before date was days away, it was completely sour.  I consumed sour milk for breakfast while sick. 
It’s been quite the week, but it’s Friday, it’s the long weekend, and with any luck we are all on the mend.  Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  I am thankful to have you all in my life.

Back to the germ factory.

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Does anyone else have the typical back-to-school cold? School germs work fast. No one in our house has been sick for at least five months, but a couple weeks into September sees us down with a cold. Although it is a pretty minor cold – the boys have had it and recovered quickly – it’s still annoying. I came down with a headache on Tuesday morning, and I was treating it all naturally and homeopathically, with various salt-water remedies, until I woke up this morning and said, fuck it, I’m going for the big guns. A Sudafed with my third cup of coffee and I feel marginally better, and significantly more jittery.

I don’t like to complain about things like colds, because truly, if no one is barfing, I’m happy. But really, the thing I hate most about a head cold is the whole “me brain no work good”. Like I was completely puzzled as to why the sink wasn’t draining when I rinsed out the teapot, only to find the offending teabag plugging the drain. Or how I became internally belligerent today at the grocery store because I couldn’t find the raisins, which were located exactly where they always are.

But MY WORD, the children. The children are so irritating. My husband says it’s not them, it’s me, which is true I’m sure but “Mom? Mom? Mom? Mom? MOM? Guess what? Mom? Guess what? Mom? Can I tell you something?” is getting to me. Are they honestly always like that and do I just not notice? Answer: probably. They seem to expect a response for every “Mom?” and even when I do respond, they continue to repeat it. “Mom? Mom?” It’s all I can do not to scream “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHAT? WHAT?” Generally by the time they finish their litany of “Mom?”’s, they have forgotten what they were saying in the first place. KILL ME.

The happy news is that the sun is out. After a summer which was, reportedly, one of the coldest on record, and ahead of what is supposed to be one of the coldest winters on record, the sun is actually shining and it is warm enough that I am not wrapped in the gigantic grey sweater my mother-in-law knitted for me ten years ago, as I have been for days. The kids have been happily playing at the school playground and I have been happily soaking up the sun, wearing three layers of sweaters. I am going to be well tomorrow, I just know it. It’s not just the Sudafed talking.