Category Archives: My failing sanity

Olympic Fever, sort of

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One of the things I love most about blogging is how much I learn.  My mind is expanding.  I mean, really, who knew about modesty socks or fake cigarettes?  WHO KNEW?  I am enlightened.  I am also confused because a very androgynous cashier called me “sir” today.  I’m not sure why.  I don’t think I look like a man.  I was wearing makeup, my hair was down, and I was wearing a pink tank top, a top that I discovered later, was missing its inserts and not properly concealing my nipples.  I don’t feel my appearance really warranted a “sir” but maybe this is a newfangled way young people refer to their elders nowadays?  Sort of like how the word “actor” refers to male and female thespians?  I don’t know.

It’s Olympic fever time around my house.  True confession: I find watching any of the events to be dull in the extreme.  I appreciate the athletes and their training, I’m happy to hear of a Canadian medaling, I understand other people’s excitement, and yet…I’m not that excited.  I did enjoy watching the opening ceremonies however.  I found myself becoming an encyclopedic explaining machine for the children, fielding questions about the British Empire, the Industrial Revolution, and Mary Poppins.  The trouble is that I tend to err on the side of over-information.  Children are by nature very black-and-white, and I end up explaining the grey areas like nobody’s business.  Half the time I can’t tell if the kids are informed or completely befuddled.  Lately some of the topics we have covered are drugs and ecstasy use, death, the dangers of not wearing helmets while bike riding, drunk driving, and what constitutes a cocktail.  After the past twenty-four hours we can now add the rise of factories and urban living in eighteenth century Britain, child labour in the modern world, and the definition of a banana hammock.

The children, unlike their mother, are very interested in watching the events with their father, who may or may not be enthused by their incessant questioning.  I observed them this morning watching the cycling and I realized that my husband is passing on his personal Olympic knowledge and general philosophies about life.  In my house, it is only acceptable to cheer for Canada, or, if the Canadian athlete is not close to finishing in the top ten, the host country, with one exception.  Under no circumstances can the American athlete be cheered for.  The Canada/US rivalry must be upheld at all times, as evidenced by the 2010 gold medal hockey game, during which I actually thought my husband was having a heart attack.  Fortunately he was not, and also fortunately, the Canadian team took the gold. 

So I have a long two weeks of Olympic commentary looming before me.  However, I think it will be more than two weeks before I get this image out of my mind.  There are some things you just can’t unsee, like how my neighbour – who has lately been mowing a lawn in both a shirt AND pants, thanks be to god – parked his truck in front of my house last night, lumbered out wearing nothing whatever but a smallish pair of shorts, and stood there with his back to me, showing off a large percentage of his butt crack.  Look away, Nicole, look away.  And yet, like a particularly horrific train wreck, I was paralyzed and powerless to look away. 

Adventures in Shopping

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So far, it has been a very strange day.  I will say that, although I am very happy at the hard working contractors and their willingness to put in extra time to get the job done (GIT ER DUN), I am starting to get very TIRED of having people in the house all the time.  The noise level is high, no matter what task they are accomplishing.  Between the tile saw, regular saws, Shop Vac, hammers, floor scraper or what-have-you, and the near-constant LOUD VOICES USING THE OPPOSITE OF POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT, the noise is getting to me.  For two days, a tiler was here, and he whistled the entire time.  THE ENTIRE TIME.  He whistled little off-tune songs, and it just kept going.  Finally I thought I would turn on some music in an attempt to drown out the whistling.  This turned out to be a mistake of epic proportions.  The tiler proceeded to whistle along to the music, but NOT WELL.  By the time my husband got home from work on Friday I had already had worked my way through the beers in the fridge and was frantically opening a bottle of wine.  Then – THEN – the tiler showed up to work before eight o’clock on Saturday morning, while I was still in the shower.  Fortunately my husband was home but the tiler saw me in my robe, which is always an awkward situation.  A friend thought maybe I could write about it a la 50 Shades of Tiling but NO. 

I’m going a bit crazy here.

In any event, I have been tasked with the choosing of a mirror, light fixture, and various towel rack implements.  My job, as given to me by the head contractor, was to go to Home Depot and choose all these things, write down the SKU numbers, and then report back in order for him to purchase them.  It seems a little, I don’t know, could we cut out the middle man here, but yet I am an obedient renovator and so I do as I am told.  I headed to the Home Depot this morning – after a routinely unpleasant, but not excessively so, trip to Walmart – and I will say this: there are no adjectives to adequately express how poorly equipped I am for a solo trip to Home Depot.  For one thing, I am only recently able to go to Costco on my own without heart-pounding anxiety that I am going to die from crushing by falling warehouse objects.  For another thing, I am easily overwhelmed.  Trips to places like Bed, Bath and Beyond, for me, start off with the simple need for a toothbrush holder, and end up with me wondering if I need a three-tiered shoe rack or a Jelly Belly ice shaver/syrup set; then I get so overwhelmed by the choices and massive amount of landfill-destined items that I leave empty handed, and still in need of a toothbrush holder. 

In any case, I headed to Home Depot, assuming a confidence that I didn’t feel, and I found the department that had the bathroom fixtures.  I immediately phoned my husband at work, near tears, saying I didn’t know how I could possibly choose a mirror.  I started to unravel, like if I chose the wrong mirror the consquences would be dire indeed: the entire renovation would be for naught, all our money and time will have been wasted, and we may as well have kept our mouldy old bathroom.  He talked me off of the mirror-choosing ledge (“Sweetie, I’m going into a meeting.  Can we talk about this later?”) and then I proceeded to raise the suspicions of many, many Home Depot employees by walking around shakily photographing things on my iPhone and making notes of the SKU numbers.  “Can I HELP you?” the orange-aproned people kept asking me, to which I responded, cheerfully “No thanks!”.  They probably thought I was one of those secret shoppers, or maybe a spy from Lowe’s. 

To add to the strangeness of this day, I brought the boys home for lunch and Jake scarfed down a sandwich, a glass of milk, and then requested half of a Caramilk bar that he had been saving.  Sure!  Why not!  After he scarfed that down and I was driving them back to school, Jake mentioned, casually, that he was going to barf.  The bees are doing what now?  I pulled over and let Jake out, when he barfed in the gutter like a miniature drunk.  Meanwhile, Mark kept asking, “Are you almost done barfing?  I don’t want to be late for school.”  Points for punctuality, although maybe not for empathy.  Although I knew he wasn’t sick, he had just eaten too quickly, I of course wasn’t going to send my just-barfed kid back to school.  So I dropped Mark off after extracting promises that he would pick up Jake’s backpack and spelling homework, and took my now-fine kid home.  Even though I had plans to pick up milk and fruit, and I still needed a goddamn toothbrush holder.

I settled Jake on the couch with a blanket and the “Quackbusters” movie, when the head contractor came to talk to me.  He told me, very seriously, that they had finally removed the toilet from the upstairs bathroom and now all the contractors would have to use the downstairs bathroom.  Which is fine, of course, except that things are a little awkward when I am working on the computer and not twenty feet away from me someone is having a bowel movement.  And doesn’t use the fan.  Which is what just happened.

I’m just saying, this has been a very strange day.  And it’s only 2:30!  I can’t wait to see what the dinner hour brings. 

And this is what my life has become

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I swore I wouldn’t write another post about the renovation, and yet it consumes me, dear reader.  My life is swallowed by the renovation, and the working around the contractor’s schedule, and the I need to choose a light fixture thinking that I have right now.  I’m even boring myself.  Be thankful you don’t need to enter into boring conversation with me on a daily basis – or if you do, and you’re reading this, I’m sorry for being so boring. 

Yesterday the bathroom was completely gutted – save for the toilet, a relief since I had a mid-level worry that someone would spontaneously contract a virulent stomach flu and would have to be herded, barfing, down the carpeted stairs to the basement bathroom, not that we have even had the stomach flu for the longest time (knock knock knocking on the hardwood floor) – the rock was chiseled off the fireplace, and the front entry tiles were removed.  Prior to this, the head contractor told me There will be some dust and noise.  INDEED.  Barkley and I hid downstairs, for the most part, since it was pouring rain and I needed to be on hand in case of questions.  At one point the air in the house was white with fine dust, and after the task was completed and I was trying to set a world record on Number Of Times One Can Clean The Same Floor Area In A Four Hour Period, dust still magically reappeared.  Perhaps it was just hanging in the air waiting for me to finish cleaning before landing, yet again, or perhaps it was asexually reproducing; I don’t know.  All I know is that I have turned into a dusty Lady Macbeth, but without the mur-diddly-urder.  So not really like Lady Macbeth at all. 

How is your June going?  A large number of my friends greet June with great dread, due to all the year-end parties and wrap-ups and recitals and whatnot.  It’s not a bad month for me; the only thing I really have going on is Super Soccer Saturday, which is really just half a day, and only involves a small amount of volunteer effort on my part.  I did panic at one point and asked my friend who was organizing the volunteers if she had me scheduled to cook the hot dogs, and so, could I NOT cook the hot dogs, and she looked at me like I was crazy and assured me that she never, ever thought of having me cook the hot dogs, at which information I was greatly relieved.  WHEW.  So things are not bad, June-wise.  I mean, except for the dust and all.

Have you ever had one of those moments of incredulity, where you wonder This is what my life has come down to?  How did this happen?  I’m having one of those moments RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND.

I am speaking at our school’s kindergarten orientation tonight, to drum up interest about the School Council and Parent Association.  Oh, ha ha ha ha!  Good times.  The parents at the kindergarten orientation are generally more full of angst that their baby is heading to kindergarten/ relief that their child has made it to kindergarten to be genuinely interested in helping to weed the naturalization area, but you never know.  I am FULL OF OPTIMISM that someone will want to assauge their feelings of lost babyhood by rashly signing up for something. 

My neighbour – Beeps‘ “daddy” – informed me excitedly that we have new neighbours.  We do?  I didn’t realize.  I am home all day long, how could I not notice something like a new neighbour?  I wondered if I was just cluelessly going about my day, not noticing a moving truck, but he was referring to the new tenants in the rental house across the alley from me.  Oh, I said, did you meet them?  Well, not the people, he said.  But, he said, in the excited voice that adults everywhere talk to small children, there’s a puppy and a kitty!  I wondered how old Beeps’ “daddy” thinks I am, and if I should be flattered or alarmed.  Later I did notice a large, friendly looking black dog in the yard.  I immediately wondered if I should go introduce myself to the new neighbours.  Perhaps I should warn them about Beeps’ idiocy and propensity to escape.  You never know, they may need to borrow a shovel. 

First Step (Ask Her Out and Treat Her Like A Lady)

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The first step in the kitchen renovation is done!  Does anyone else immediately get Step By Step by Eddie Rabbit stuck in their head after saying the words “first step”?  Or is it just me?  I also cannot say – or listen to – the words “Here’s the situation” without mentally rapping the entire second half of Parents Just Don’t Understand by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince.  If I was hooked up to a brain monitor right now, it would show my mind exploding with both those songs, simultaneously, just from writing those words down.  It’s a good thing I never did my Ph.D., or I would possibly no longer have room in my head for every song lyric ever written. 

In any case, the countertops, sink, and backsplash are now installed in the kitchen; lighting, appliances, and flooring are yet to come.  I think the first step was the worst, in terms of completely inconveniencing everyone.  The first cut is the deepest?  Baby, I know.  Anyway, what the not-so-festive long weekend showed me was that I really spend a massive amount of my day in the kitchen.  When the kitchen was out of order, I descended into some kind of strange sloth and confusion as to what to do now?  But now that we are back in business, baby, I have resumed my normal activity level and am now spending much of my day in the kitchen, but not barefoot and – thankfully – not pregnant.

Which brings me to this point: when one wakes up at 4:40 am, this is what one can accomplish prior to 10:00 am:

Drive to yoga studio and back, practice for 95 minutes.
Feed dog, kids, and self, in that order.
Unload dishwasher, clean kitchen, make beds, pack school snacks.
Shower, dress, makeup, and hair.
Clean bathroom.
Ensure children are adequately dressed, washed, and have brushed their teeth.
Start laundry.
Give self a manicure and check email while the polish dries.
Take kids to school and hang out with them until the bell rings.
Book appointment for husband with a strange online registration program.
Walk dog.

This makes me feel very virtuous, until I realize that when one wakes up at 4:40 am, this is what one can accomplish after 8:00 pm:

Supervise children’s showers and teeth-brushing in a semi-catatonic state.
Tuck children into bed.
Collapse on couch and try to muster up the energy to watch an episode of Mad Men on Netflix.
Go to bed.

What I’m saying here is that I’m really more of a morning person.

Anyway, I’m so pleased with my kitchen renovation and the speed at which I had a functioning kitchen, that we have decided to remodel the bathroom!  And re-tile the front entry!  And re-finish the fireplace!  And lose my mind, apparently. 

For those of you who live in an older home, perhaps you have experienced this problem with renovating: once one thing is changed, it kind of makes the rest of the house look, how shall I say this, in need of an update.  It’s the black hole of renovating, it’s sucking me in.  The contractor actually suggested that my house would be so much more open if I just wanted to knock down this wall…but I shall not think of that right now.  I will only think about the fact that by NEXT THURSDAY my new kitchen is scheduled to be completed!  Right on time for a visit from my in-laws!

Cue ominous music.

Barkley, the high maintenance dog

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“Oh, you’re the worst kind.  You’re high maintenance, but you think you’re low maintenance.” – Harry Burns, and/or my husband.

Every day, I set out two sets of clothing for the following day: my yoga clothes, and my regular clothes.  I need to set out my yoga clothes in order to dress quietly and sneak out at the crack of OMG o’clock, and I need to set out my regular clothes because I need to set out my regular clothes or it will be endtimes.  I set out my clothes based on the next day’s weather and activities, and I do not deviate from that outfit. 

The other day it turned out to be unexpectedly rainy and foggy, and so I needed to wear my hair up, so that I wouldn’t look like a bedraggled mess by the end of the day.  That meant – since I’m on week eleven of Operation Growing Out My Hair – I needed certain hair accessories to hold back the multiple layers.  However, the hair accessories did not match my outfit, and so I had to alter my plans and wear a different shirt.  This may not sound like much to you – and now that I’m writing it down it doesn’t sound like much to me, either – but it threw my day off, just a little bit. 

You know how people say that after a while, dogs take on their owner’s personalities?  Actually, I don’t know if that’s a thing or not, but my dog has taken on MY personality.  For one thing, he freaks out if we don’t put him in his crate by 9:00 pm.  If he could speak, he would be saying It’s bedtime for the love of god!  Put me to bed, already!  Do you want me to be tired all day tomorrow?  I’m just saying, I understand. 

When we were recently redoing the basement, I was prepared for confusion on my dog’s part.  This is the dog who lay outside the bathroom door crying because he had accidentally wagged a shampoo bottle off of the side of the tub.  Something’s different.  The shampoo bottle is on the floor.  Everything is wrong!  When the boys play too noisily for his liking, he would go down to the basement and curl up on the green-and-white fabric sofa down there.  I knew we would be giving away that sofa, and so I went out and bought a cozy new dog bed, along with a new squeaky toy and some of his favourite chew treats.  When the sofa was gone, I put his new dog bed in the usual spot by the fireplace upstairs, and took the old one downstairs, along with the squeaky toy and the treat.  He followed me anxiously, eyeing the treat.  Here, Barkley, I said, here is a cozy new place for you!  I made him sit in the old dog bed, gave him a treat, and then witnessed my dog and the mental anguish I made him suffer. 

He took the treat and ran upstairs.  He dropped the treat in his new bed and stared at me.  Then he started whining.  Loudly.  He refused to eat the treat, which alarmed me because a) he eats everything vaguely edible, including his own fecal matter if it is left unattended, b) he consumes everything in his dog bowl within 90 seconds of receiving his dog bowl, and c) he has never before NOT eaten a treat. 

Me: It’s okay, Barkley. Have your treat!  Now you have two cozy places to sit! 

Barkley: WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIEEEEEE.

He contined to cry and whine, loudly, for the next hour.  Once in a while he would settle down enough to LICK the treat, but then it would make him cry all over again. 

Barkley: Why are you so cruel?  Why do you hate me?  What have I done to deserve this?

Then he would sit in the new bed in such an awkward way that the bed itself would tip over sideways and land on top of him and believe me, this did not help matters.  Finally he gave up, took the treat, and hid in his crate, surreptitiously eating it.  He eventually forgave me the mental pain I had put him through; he is a dog after all.

I understood.  Change is hard.  Different things are difficult.  WE ALL NEED TIME TO GET USED TO NEW IDEAS.  So I get it.  And yet sometimes I feel like there is a reality TV show, just waiting to be made, with my name on it. 

Warning: Shinpads Will Not Prevent Injury From Getting Run Over By A Wayward Car On The Soccer Field

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The past few days have been unseasonably warm, record-breaking warm, and yet yesterday at 5:30 pm – one hour before the first soccer practice of the season – the sky grew black and the rain started to pour.  It was, as always, a festive start to the season.  The practice was held in the rain, the kids warm with exercise, and the parents standing grim-faced under a sea of umbrellas. 

You can probably expect nine weeks of weather-and-soccer-related complaints from me.

I did, however, get a smile out of the warning label on Mark’s new shinpads – shinpads that fit an eight year old boy.  “Warning: no shinpad can prevent all foreseeable injury.  Severe injury may still occur.  Dangerous play should be discouraged.”  Thank you, shinpads!  I appreciate the warning.  I will remember that even though Mark is wearing a shinpad, should he get stampeded by elephants on the soccer field, or should the soccer players decide to scrimmage with chainsaws, the shinpads will not prevent injury.  This is U8 community soccer.  I think he’ll be okay.

I just typed that and had a terribly ominous feeling that I just jinxed the entire season and that something terrible is going to happen.  Given the league’s penchant for never ever calling the game, no matter what awful weather, that terrible thing is probably lightening striking the field or concussions due to softball sized hail.  The shinpad people are right; no shinpad will protect a kid from a lightening strike.  Oh god, is there metal in those shinpads?  Maybe the shinpads will actually be a conductor for a lightening strike.  Why is THAT risk not listed on the package?

Now I’m getting all worked up. 

Also getting me worked up is that, in addition to our basement being repainted, my husband has decided to entirely rearrange it, including new shelving units, turning the office into storage space and the main area into a living room/workout area/office.  This is, as my good friend always says, a good problem to have, a problem of abundance, and it is a much needed improvement in our space usage.  However.  Right now we are at the stage of moving items around and purging items that things are going to be much, much worse before they get better.  The basement is currently a disaster of epic proportions.  It will get better, though, and when it does, I will post pictures, I promise. 

I was reading an article in Brain, Child about a family with four girls and one boy, the boy being the fourth, and not, as some might conjecture, the fifth.  It was an interesting read with regards to gender preferences and something I found relevant ever since I had Jake.  For years, I was questioned about if I was going to try for a girl, something I always found repellant in every way.  I always feel sorry for those kids who were the “wrong” gender (I’ve heard people say, about their own children, “He/she was supposed to be a girl/boy”, which is insensitive and also stupid) and I also think that having two boys is very cool and fun and I’m completely satisfied with my life as is.  I hadn’t heard that line of questioning for a while, since my youngest is in Grade One and after a while, people just stop asking.  But then the other day a salesman, of all people, asked if I was going to “go for a girl” and I was completely startled.  Let me tell you something, if I woke up tomorrow, pregnant: a) I would not be happy, and b) I would have a lot of explaining to do.  It wouldn’t matter if it was a girl or a boy, this would not be a cheerful prospect.  So when the salesman said that, I and my shrivelly, uninterested ovaries just looked askance at him.

I’m not really sure about his salesmanship.  What a strange tactic.  It’s even stranger than my “Puss in Boots” shoe-shopping adventure and my “Wow, you’re way cooler than my mom” pursuit of non-mom jeans, which is saying a lot. 

Volunteer Fatigue and Mrs. Robinson

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The boys went to Aggie Days with their school yesterday.  They came home, alternately raving with excitement about it and complaining about the crowds.  Those are my boys!  They talked about the sheep shearing – sheep are, Jake informed me, very good listeners – and the corn mazes.  The parent volunteer for their group was a friend of mine and was apparently very fun and even let them go through the corn maze a lot!   Note that I was not volunteering.  I received the permission forms and quickly sent them back without checking the “I can help!” box.  Just the thought of riding on a school bus with sixty first and second graders made me feel nauseous, let alone spending the day in a crowded, giant facility looking at livestock.  Not to mention the anxiety I feel spending the day in a crowded, giant facility and being responsible for someone else’s children.

I am also at the point where if one more person asks me to do one more thing on a volunteer basis, I am going to stab that person.  I feel pretty maxed out, volunteer-wise, as I do every year at this time.  One would think that I would have learned my lesson by now.  But no.  This is the bane of the stay-at-home mom’s existence.  The general assumption is that stay-at-home moms have nothing better to do, so they may as well volunteer, and in some ways that’s true.  I certainly have much more time to volunteer than a mother with an actual paying job, and I have much more time to volunteer than a mother with very small children at home.  And so I tend to take on a lot of volunteer related jobs – chairing the PA, for example, or writing for the community newsletter (putting the FREE into free-lance, that’s me), or running the school’s book fairs, or scheduling the community soccer games for, god help me, four years running (THERE WILL NOT BE A FIFTH, I SWEAR, YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST).  But none of these are small undertakings, and by mid-April of each year I have extreme volunteer fatigue.  And so when I get asked to chaperone a field trip, for example, I become unreasonably enraged and stabby, and self-righteously think that someone ELSE can do it for a change, although there is never a shortage of volunteers for field trips and, other than the one time I went to the fire hall with Jake’s preschool (which was for entirely cougar-licious, self gratification reasons), I have never chaperoned a field trip. 

It turns out that my friend who was in charge of Mark and Jake’s group was much more fun than I would have been, anyway.  I probably would have gotten very bored of the corn maze.

Instead of going to Aggie Days, I went shopping with my mom for my birthday, which is in two days!  I need to unpack my tiara and my “It’s My Birthday” sandwich board.  But my mom and I had fun shopping, and she bought me this sweater, among other things:

I like this sweater, but am currently worried that I am bringing to mind that awful saying regarding mutton dressed as lamb.  It’s a crop top, after all, and although I have no intention of starting to wear crop tops with Daisy Dukes, I still feel slightly self conscious.  I mean, I’m going to be thirty-seven in a couple of days.  It’s hard to know what’s appropriate.  It’s hard to be stylish without crossing the line from “fashionable” to “desperate-looking cougar”.  I have an aunt who I recall thinking she was hard-core styling when I was around eleven, but looking back, I think that those hot pink suede miniskirts and tasseled jackets were actually not appropriate for a woman in her thirties.  Although, it was the eighties, so who knows.  Maybe that was appropriate back then.  I had permed hair; who am I to judge anyone?

Here’s a little tidbit for those of you who are in your late thirties or beyond – Anne Bancroft was thirty-six when she played Mrs. Robinson.  THIRTY-SIX.  The thought makes me feel a little faint, to be honest.  As of Saturday, I am going to be older than Mrs. Robinson.

It makes me feel a little self-conscious to go to the firehall to drop off my bag of old batteries, that’s all I’m saying.