Category Archives: My failing sanity

Cherry Cherry

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Sometimes, in order to get motivated, one needs to have a period of complete sloth, and that was me last week. I didn’t exercise. I didn’t work. I did the bare minimum around the house. Basically I spent a lot of time on the couch, with a glass of wine and this:

pioneergirl

Between my kids, husband, and mother-in-law, I received fifteen books for Christmas. My husband had wrapped them all but when we got an Amazon delivery on December 23, he decided he had enough of wrapping paper and tape and just handed me the book. It has essentially taken up every spare second I have had since then. I will have much to say about this – the Ingalls family saw much more scandal and poverty than one might think from reading the children’s books – but it will have to be at another time.

On Christmas morning, my husband handed me a small package, saying in a discouraged tone that he wasn’t sure I would like it, and that he did keep the receipt. It’s very unusual for him to be so unsure about a gift, since he normally bats things right out of the park. For example, this was in my stocking:

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Santa sure knows how to stuff MY stocking.

Anyway, my husband was uncharacteristically filled with insecurity, but when I opened the gift I couldn’t understand why. This choice shows how well he knows me!

neil

I’m not going to say it’s the greatest Christmas album ever, but it’s definitely close.

So I was mostly slothful and busy eating lots of snack mix and drinking lots of wine, but I had to haul myself off the couch on Christmas day, because I was hosting Christmas dinner. It was my very first that I hosted, and I think it went really well.

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After all this relaxation and festivity, I woke up on Boxing Day with a bee in my bonnet. I was filled with my usual urge to rip down the tree and

hyperbole

But for reasons unknown, I had agreed to go Boxing Day shopping with my husband. Every year he takes advantage of the sales to purchase new suits, ties, and other expensive work wear. I had, for some reason – marital harmony, perhaps – said I would go with him while the kids stayed at home and played with their new video games. And I will tell you this: it was a huge mistake. For one thing, since Jacob closed its doors, every other clothing store means nothing to me. NOTHING. While my husband was busily fitting new suits, I was wandering from store to store amongst hordes of people who were foaming at the mouth. I wandered into Guess only to be completely shocked by the clothing. I wandered into H&M and wandered back out when I was confronted by the same black acid wash jeans I had in junior high. I was a person without a destination, which is not the way to Boxing Day shop, as evidenced by the stampede of people at Aritzia. In the end, I was bitterly regretting the one hour I spent at the mall, and by the time my husband was done I was pretty much ready to run home, just so I could clean the house.

The second we got in the door, I took off my “nice shopping clothes” and put on yoga pants, fuzzy socks, and an old waffle-weave shirt and began boxing things up. All Christmas-card glitter and dust was wiped away, the floors were washed, the bathroom scoured, the laundry done. It was, as always, a most satisfying project, Project End Christmas On Boxing Day.

And once again I will remind everyone that there are two types of Christmas Elves in the world, of which I belong to the latter category: 12 Days of Christmas Elves, and Advent Elves. We Advent Elves start Christmas festivities early. We are the ones who finish shopping in November, dig out our Christmas CDs the second Halloween decorations are put away, and fight the desire to tear down the tree at 10:00 am on December 25. 12 Days of Christmas Elves are the ones who keep their trees up into the New Year, who wrap gifts on December 24, and who think Advent Elves are insane. It’s okay! We think you’re kind of crazy too. We can still be friends!

As an important side note: the 12 days of Christmas START on Christmas. They do not start 12 days prior to Christmas.

In any case, around the Boyhouse things are pretty quiet this week. It’s terribly cold, so we are in hibernation mode: the kids playing with their new things, I’m enjoying my new books and clean house, and Barkley is just happy to have things back to normal.

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Riding the Roller Coaster of Emotion

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So there I was, just going about my day like any other; I was driving back home from dropping the kids off at school, and guess what I found in my back alley:

manny4

manny3

Manny! What have they done to you?

For those of you who haven’t been following the Mannequin Saga of 2014, when we first saw Manny I thought he was a dead body hidden amongst the tree branches in the green space across the alley, directly behind my house.

deadguy

 

Soon after that, Manny was raised, Lazarus-like, from the dead.

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And now, Manny is in pieces, with only an errant shoe and an empty Corona case to show for his travels.

manny1

Here’s the thing, though. Prior to this week, all of Manny’s activities have taken place directly behind my house. When I found our poor desecrated Manny, he was half a block down the alley. SOMEONE must have taken him, walked him down the alley, and then fed him Corona until he was numb before sawing him in two, like some magician’s assistant in a magic trick gone wrong. My suspicions lie with the people who live in the house behind which I found him.

It is worth noting that Manny has a few extra wounds to his torso than when we first found him.

manny2

But he is still one-armed. One arm is better than no arms, am I right?

Now here’s the thing: I cheerfully drove down the alley yesterday, on my way to pick up the boys and also to catch a glimpse of my favourite mannequin. I had the idea that maybe, just maybe, I would put a toque on him, in the spirit of the person who decorated the trees at the dog park. Just my little contribution to happiness in the neighbourhood.

But Manny was gone.

At first I thought maybe he’d been picked up with the garbage, but then I remembered that garbage day was Tuesday, so that couldn’t be it. It was terribly windy yesterday morning but I didn’t see him anywhere, and anyway he was pretty packed down in the snow and ice.

Baby, come back. You can blame it all on me. I was wrong, and I just can’t live without you.

 

Something strange in the neighbourhood

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You guys, you guys, YOU GUYS. Someone has been playing with the creepy mannequin behind my house.

creepymannequin creepymannequin2

As unnerving as it was seeing the dead-body-ish leg poking out from behind the pile of branches, it was nothing compared to driving home on a Sunday morning to see the mannequin rising, Lazarus-like, from the dead. The dog keeps growling at it from across the alley. I keep forgetting it’s there; I’ll back the car out of the garage and see it in the rearview mirror, and I gasp every time, EVERY TIME. I’m like Dr. Kimble: there was a one-armed man, you must find him. The fact that he is creepily standing at attention, staring into my backyard, is kind of getting to me. A few people have suggested I make friends with it; maybe take it a toque or a scarf, or at least cover up its junk – it’s cold out, we wouldn’t want the fellow to be suffering embarrassment due to shrinkage.

A couple of people have suggested I throw it in my garbage can, but really, this is a life-sized mannequin. Plus, just in case it was involved in some sort of kinky bedroom play, I don’t really want to touch it. Ew!

In other strange news, yesterday I took Barkley to the dog park and there were at least twenty-five little tiny dogs there, all wearing sweaters and all barking madly. It was strangely unnerving. I wondered if they were barking in fury because they were wearing sweaters, or maybe were they taunting the other, non-sweater wearing dogs. Maybe they were showing off: I’m wearing a sweater look at meeeeeee. Who can say? I can only comment that Barkley seemed unimpressed; he did not greet or sniff any of the yappy, sweater-clad dogs. Maybe he feels left out, like he showed up to the party wearing jeans when everyone else was in fancy dresses. Or, more appropriately, he went to the Ugly Sweater party in a regular outfit.

It was a bit of an odd weekend, and not just because of the raised-from-the-dead mannequin or the doggie sweater party that Barkley wasn’t invited to. The much-anticipated new washing machine that was delivered on Friday was found to have a hole in the drain hose. And this is where I give all you unmarried people a piece of advice: if you, like me, are untalented in the “handy” area, and you have a tendency to burst into tears when faced with a problem requiring handiness, MARRY A HANDY PERSON. Because my god, I was weepily grateful for my husband who was able to jury-rig a solution for me using duct tape and some clamp thingies. The hose – for those who are interested – is “housed internally” and so a repairman is being sent out, since the hose was not easily replaceable on a Friday night, with a crying wife standing amid a mountain of laundry. In any case, the repairman for my brand new washer which should be a thing of beauty and not a cause for my nervous breakdown is coming tomorrow, but at least the temporary – if ugly – solution is working and my mountain of laundry is no longer.

My husband and I headed out to Canadian Tire on Saturday morning, to get the clamp thingies, which surely have a name that I do not know, and we somehow ended up with icicle lights, a light-up deer in a grazing position, and a gigantic LED outdoor Christmas tree. Christmas decorations AND a working washing machine? These are things to be grateful for indeed!

The posters are five dollars each.

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The book fair is all over! It was a big success and now I’m really, really ready for a big glass of wine. Forget the glass, I may just take my friend Hannah‘s advice and stick a straw in the bottle. I only went through two brief periods where I hated children and the entire world, but each period was only about ten minutes long, so I feel like that is a win. I also only had to say “Gentle hands and polite words ONLY when we are at the book fair” twice. However, I answered numerous variations of the question regarding the price of posters approximately one million times, but that is only to be expected.

I’m TIRED. There was also a SC/PA meeting to chair, and karate class for the kids, and a whole lot of paperwork and money counting to do. Plus, there was the little issue of an unexpected Tech Club meeting. At 11:55 on Wednesday, the announcement came over the PA system, reminding Tech Club members of the lunch time meeting. The boys are both (nerdily) in Tech Club, but this meeting was brand new information to them. Since they are two of five children out of six hundred that go home for lunch, we were in a bit of a pickle. No lunch! But there was no way they could miss the meeting, which was all about setting up AV equipment and caring for the school’s laptops. This was a very important meeting. PANIC AT THE DISCO. I did what anyone would do; I sped home, packed two lunches, and sped back to the school. Note, I said TWO lunches. I went back to the book fair – which is closed at lunch – and tidied things up a little. I did not realize that I had forgotten my own lunch. I realized it around 4:15 when I felt like I was going to die of grumpiness. I can empathize with the toddler set, is what I’m saying.

The nice thing about doing this for six years is that I can really see how the children’s tastes have changed over the years. I see kids who are now in Grade Six choosing I Survived books and Dear Canada books, when it seems like just a moment ago that I was helping them choose easy readers about the World’s Cutest Animals. I have kids who tell me about what they bought at the last book fair, and about how they’ve saved up their allowance to buy the Minecraft Construction Handbook. I walk down the halls and kids wave at me to tell me that the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid is the best ever. Last year, a ten year old boy was dejected as he really, really wanted the Pokémon Essential Handbook but it wasn’t available, and when I procured one for him through the magic of online ordering, he literally jumped up and down with excitement. There are many critics of Scholastic, with their exclusive marketing and their books that fall apart with repeated readings, but to me, it is all outweighed by the fact that those two days of answering the posters are all five dollars each yielded $3000 for our library, home reading, and ELL programs. Sure, the books are frequently gender-specific and feature a lot of Barbie and Cars characters, but the kids are reading, and they’re excited about reading, and I’m satisfied with that.

I’m going to overlook the fact that I had to thwart a couple young shoplifters and other depressing findings. Focus on the good! Mark had a few extra quarters burning a hole in his pocket, and so he bought me a bookmark. It’s purple and it says “DIVA” on it in sparkly letters.

More exciting news around here – my new washer was just delivered, and it’s a thing of beauty. The only problem is that my husband wanted to hook it up himself, and who knows when he’ll be home tonight, and so the piles of laundry are not getting any smaller. It’s funny, I never realized how much time I spend doing the laundry until I spent a week not doing the laundry. I foresee a weekend of folding clothes.

The delivery was slated for any time between 12 and 6, which meant that the boys – for the first time ever – walked home by themselves. I was unreasonably anxious about it, given that they a) know the way home very well, b) would cross the busiest street with the school crossing guard, and c) my oldest child actually IS a school crossing guard, but you know. Mothers. It’s also about minus 20 with the windchill and my children have a very bad habit of stuffing their hats and mitts in their backpacks. I’m happy to report that not only did they make it home with all their winter gear actually on, but they also brought a friend with them. Hot chocolate and cookies for everyone!

Well. Since it’s several hours before my husband gets home to start The Great Laundry Caper, and the butternut squash soup for dinner is simmering on the stove, and the crusty bread is in the oven baking, I think I will pour myself a glass of wine and binge-watch a few episodes of The Good Wife. A nice end to a crazy week! Happy weekend, lovely readers. xoxo

 

How to be the most glamourous, exciting, and charming girl in your set.

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So much sadness, my washer died mid-cycle today, leaving behind a stinky mess of sopping wet clothes and an odour that is permeating the basement. Goodbye, washer. I’ll miss you. Meanwhile I spent a sizeable chunk of time pulling the clothes out and finding places to hang them so they won’t mildew prior to my camping out at a VERY KIND friend’s house with my laundry basket. I feel a bit like a desperate university student, like I’m going to start dragging a garbage bag full of clothes around with me. Also, I dripped some of the icky undrained water on my sweater and leggings so now I feel like I smell a bit. I probably do smell a bit, distressingly enough.

Anyway, there are worse problems, right? Like finding this is in the green space behind my house:

deadguy

I was backing out of the garage, on my way to run errands, and I saw a leg sticking out from behind a pile of branches. Hmm. I have seen people, on many occasions, passed out in the alley and green space behind my house, so I assumed it was a similar situation. Hours later, it was still there. By this time I had the kids in the car and I had to know – was it a body? I told the kids to stay put and I nervously approached what I HOPED wasn’t a dead body. The kids kept yelling from the car, to not go near it, because it was DEAD. Mom, NO. NO! Don’t go near the dead body!

And yet, I was compelled to approach it, because I worried that if it was actually a dead body, we would have an unreported dead body in the alley, and that seemed way worse than my viewing said dead body. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that it was just a mannequin with its arm ripped off, and yet, it wasn’t all that reassuring. How did it get there? What, exactly, are my neighbours up to?

Speaking of creepy, I’ve been going through my Childhood Boxes of Terror, as my husband calls them, and there are some very interesting findings indeed. For example, a Xeroxed letter from Corey Hart, indicating my admission into the Corey Hart Fan Club.

CoreyHart

And in case you’re not sure it gets better than that, it does.

RoyalBaby

This ain’t my first rodeo OR Royal Baby Watch.

Those old People magazines are a hoot, by the way. The hairstyles alone are worth the price of admission. Plus, there are so many cigarette ads! Virginia Slims – You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby. Not only did I collect these magazines, paper doll books, and commemorative publications, but I also had this:

Scrapbook

Not only does it have very carefully pasted magazine and newspaper clippings that are very carefully labelled, the front of the book features swoopy writing and a My Little Pony puffy sticker.

Have you ever felt lacking in charm? Maybe you don’t feel beautiful? Or glamourous? Lord knows that after bailing out a smelly dead washing machine, I feel a little wilted. Well, I have the antidote for you:

charmandbeauty

Do YOU want to become the most glamourous, exciting, and charming girl in your set? Faithfully following the pointers in these books will lead to instant popularity and, needless to say, happiness. These were published in the early 60s and they are GOLD. There is an entire section answering the question as to why one should use deodorant, and another whole section on the monthly curse, although it is not titled as such. If you’ve noticed an increased interest in homemaking and grooming, you may be ready for the talk.

Well, I am pretty interested in homemaking at the moment, specifically, how to get my home to not smell like a mildewed sewer. It’s a good thing I’m going to be recipe testing this weekend for homemade vegan Baileys. I have a feeling I’m going to need it, if only to dull the pain of missing my dear, departed washer.

Always A Bridesmaid…

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Gentlemen, you may want to skip this one.

 

This month I was reminded – not for the first time – that in my not-so-distant past, getting my period was the worst part of the “monthly cycle”. Sure, there would be a day or two prior to that of maybe feeling deeply sad when I heard “Tears in Heaven” or extremely irritated when my husband put his peanut-butter knife in the sink, rather than the dishwasher, and maybe a day of craving salty and/ or chocolatey things, but in general, those slight annoyances were nothing compared to the discomfort and inconvenience of actually menstruating. In my very-distant youth, I can remember skipping gym and taking some Midol, but pretty much that was it. It seemed like a big deal at the time, but with age comes wisdom and I can now say that Nicole-in-the-past was a complete baby.

Because not only does age bring wisdom, but it also brings a whole lot of hormonal changes. These days my ladies’ holidays feel like I’m Carrie at the prom, as opposed to the past, when I was Sandy doing the hand-jive, if we are to take 1970s dance metaphors to a whole new gross level. Getting my period is now the good part, and not just because it reaffirms that the baby factory is closed. No, it is the good part because it ends the time of the cycle that causes me to doubt my own sanity.

I will not use the words time of the month because I don’t know about you, but there is nothing monthly about this. Three weeks, seven weeks, or anything in between can be considered “normal” for me. This is a problem because there is no way to predict when I will be sane and when I will not be. This past cycle saw me struggling with suddenly ill-fitting bras, sudden strange cravings, irritation with everything and extreme emotion about anything for ELEVEN DAYS. At one point I said to my husband that if I didn’t get my period soon, I would die of emotion. I started to wonder if maybe I was never getting my period again, and my personality had just warped into someone horrible who, incidentally, hated the way she looked and couldn’t handle the sound of children’s laughter. Maybe I’m really just a grumpy bloated bitch, and now I’m in menopause. This was an actual thought that I had.

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride – but in a menstrual sense.

So it’s been that kind of week. Jake had a cold that kept him home from school and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that being tied to the house for a day and a half didn’t help matters, especially with my new obsession with cleaning and purging things. I found a “Franklin and Friends” treasury that I kept weepily showing to Jake, who remained stoic.

Me: Look, Jake. It’s Franklin. Franklin’s Bad Day. He was SAD because his friend was moving away. But then he made a new friend.

Jake: Uh huh.

Me: And Franklin’s Trip to the Hospital. Remember how much I read this to you before your operation? Do you remember?

Jake: Um. Well. I don’t really remember much about my operation.

Me: And when Franklin’s mom has a baby! *tears up*

Jake: Um, Mom? I don’t really like that book anymore. I kind of mostly like books about dragons now.

So that was entertaining. I did, however, get my closet and drawers reorganized and you will be happy to know that I still have several drawers full of predominantly black sweaters. I took photos but they are unconvincing. You will have to believe me that it’s a huge change and things aren’t falling off of my shelves now. For example:

before

Before

after

Trust me, this is way more organized.

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Oh, the top shelf of the closet, where everything gets balled up and thrown into.

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IT IS SERIOUSLY MORE ORGANIZED.

At some point I need to go through the gigantic Rubbermaid containers of children’s artwork and school work that is downstairs, but I need to do it at a time where I am not going to cry about Franklin and Friends.

Wardrobe Malfunction

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In case you’re wondering how scintillating I really am, let me tell you about my recurring dream in which I am folding laundry. That is all that I do in the dream; fold laundry. Even my dream self gets bored as I patiently fold shirts, towels, etc., and sort them into neat piles. Sometimes I’m able to wake myself up, like a person having a nightmare, by saying to my dream-self you’re having that boring dream again – wake up! Unfortunately, when I go back to sleep I often have my second recurring dream in which I’m making soup. Just me, stirring a large Dutch oven full of soup. Often the soup in question is eggplant soup, and sometimes I wonder if I should leave it chunky or puree it, and then I get out my blender. At this point I usually wake up.

If dreams indeed do mean anything at all, I wonder what these say about me. I’m afraid it wouldn’t be flattering.

But who needs exciting, anyway? The house has enough excitement without ME being a thrill-a-minute. While we were on vacation, I realized – not for the first time, nor for the last – that my husband truly is the fun parent. He’s the one cannonballing into the pool with the kids while I lazily float by, only in the water long enough to cool off before resuming my poolside book reading. He’s the one who could spend hours with them playing in the wave pool while I need to go warm up in the hot tub after ten minutes. He’s the one who takes them on epic bike rides and stages legendary water fights while I drink wine and gossip with my mother.

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Me, hanging out lazily while my husband takes the kids on an epic ride in the utility vehicle.

It might be weird having two fun parents anyway; I mean, someone has to be the grim-faced harridan who oversees sunscreen application and adequate hydration and proper nutrition even while on holiday. So that someone might as well be me.

On occasion, I can be actually fun. I will go down any waterslide at a water park, I will go on any rollercoaster, and I even buy the kids the occasional sno cone or cotton candy, considering that all that sugar and food colouring is PROBABLY okay in moderation. We were at a very fun aquatic centre while on vacation, and the kids had a blast. They finished the afternoon by jumping off the diving board several times, and they urged me to join them. I declined, but then started to think that maybe I should. I should TRY to be fun, I want the kids to remember me as being occasionally adventurous and cool. I watched my husband do a spin jump off the diving board, to cheers from them, and so I decided yes. I hadn’t jumped off a diving board in thirty years but dammit, I can be fun too, I thought. I removed my hair band, patted my braid into place, and stepped onto the diving board. I jumped, then swam to the side. My husband looked at me for a moment, then informed me that my bikini top had not stayed where it was supposed to. Wardrobe malfunction! I fixed it and said that I hoped no one witnessed my embarrassment. He was silent for a moment, while I was briefly encouraged that I was right, that no one saw my nipple. Eventually he broke it to me; several people, including the lifeguards and the parents at the side of the pool, DID see. Oh.

Fun and exciting, it’s overrated. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some laundry to fold.