Category Archives: Testosterone-y

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.

I’m With Stupid

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My husband went back to work this week after two weeks off, and to be honest, I oscillated between looking forward to getting back to regular routine and dreading the kids’ emotional fallout from getting back into our regular routine. This week has been fine, anticlimactically enough, and so yesterday we went to an amusement park with a good friend and her daughters. We were standing in line, and I noticed the twentysomething guy behind us wearing a t-shirt proclaiming “Vagitarian”.

Ew. Also? Unlikely. I’m fairly certain that someone advertising himself as a Vagitarian is more likely to be living in his parents’ basement playing Wii and using his mother’s back copies of Glamour magazine instead of purchasing pornography than he is to actually have been ever involved in an intimate relationship with a woman. I’m just speculating here, but that seems the most likely conclusion. I mean, I cannot imagine any self-respecting woman seeing a guy in a Vagitarian shirt and thinking that she would like a piece of that action, yes please, and can you keep that shirt on for the duration? Seriously. I once saw a guy wearing a shirt that read “Yes, it IS that big!” Uh huh. Sure it is.

Of course, I am writing this while wearing a shirt that says “Harmony, Peace, Serenity”, so I’m not sure what that says about me as a person.

T-shirts with statements are strange things. On the one hand, I find them somewhat amusing when I see them in a store. When I see them actually being worn, I have the same feeling that I have when I see personalized license plates – somewhat LAME. Or worse. I saw a little onesie that said “All Mommy wanted was a back rub”, which is slightly amusing, I guess, but if I actually saw it being worn by an infant, I would be absolutely appalled.

No one is quite immune to the lure of the t-shirt, though. Recently my husband and I were in Banff for the night and immediately following a meal in which I was channelling my inner Carrie Bradshaw by drinking one too many Cosmopolitans we stopped in one of those tacky tourist shops. Right in front of me was a shirt that said “Too pretty for math”. Squee! I wanted that shirt right away and had I had two too many Cosmopolitans, instead of one, I probably would have purchased it on the spot, but as it was, I still was somewhat capable of rational thought: a) the population at large does not know me, so the irony of the statement would be unappreciated, and b) a woman in her mid-thirties with permanent forehead creases, grey roots, and varicose veins wearing such a shirt is pathetic at best.

So perhaps I should follow my own “Harmony, Peace, Serenity” t-shirt and give the “Vagitarian” the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was channelling his inner Frank the Tank when his t-shirt was purchased. Perhaps.

Slightly Warmer than Average Wave!

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The whole continent, it seems, is having a heat wave, and meanwhile it has been slightly warmer than average in Calgary. I’m certainly not complaining, mind you, I’ll take slightly warmer than average over unbelievably cold with gale force winds, which was the case earlier in the week, when I met my best friend and her four kids at the playground. We ended up staying all of ten minutes before the rain started and the boys and I began our cold, windy, and wet walk home.

But now it’s lovely and warm and we have been spending our days outside. I saw this article and wondered if, perhaps, this explains why my neighbour persists in shirtlessness, regardless of the weather conditions. Sadly, I think it is unrelated to the noise level and has more to do with the intrinsic belief in the kind of sexuality that can only be expressed through the wearing of nothing whatsoever but cut-off sweat pants and gigantic running shoes. But even writing this I know that I am being hypocritical: if my neighbour resembled someone in one of those Diet Coke commercials, I certainly would not be complaining about it. However.

Yesterday I forayed inside in search of heat-resistant snacks, and was treated to some words every mother loves to hear: “Mom, I pulled the thing off the blue thing outside? And it exploded.” Ah. Explosions. I went out to see our mister/sprinkler, missing the screw that makes it a mister, shooting water into the air not unlike a fire hose. The mister is now a high-pressure instrument of water torture. And because I subscribe, apparently, to a very high level of energetic parenting in the summer, I relaxed on the deck with a book whist said water torture instrument was vigorously employed. The boys took turns stepping into the line of fire, so to speak, and then taking their umbrellas into the line of fire, and then shot streams of water onto the trees, which the trees probably appreciated. I looked up from my book only occasionally to ask them to turn down the water if it started to go into our neighbour’s yard.

My lovely, elderly next door neighbour is very tolerant of the boys and their shenanigans. I think perhaps she is a little hard of hearing, which works well for neighbourly relations. This did not stop me from becoming completely smug while we chatted over the fence and she complimented me on the boys. “I never hear them fighting!” she said, “They sure get along well. I don’t ever hear crying!” Which is true, they rarely fight or cry, especially outside. I straightened my shoulders proudly. At that exact moment of pride, the back door flew open to reveal a sobbing, hysterical Jake, naked except for a t-shirt. Tears streamed down his face as he screamed that he needed to use the bathroom, but there was a spider in the toilet, and he didn’t want to eliminate on it. And with that, I excused myself from the conversation and went to flush a spider.

Bad Wife!

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I spent much of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday doing a yoga workshop with Kino MacGregor, an amazing woman, and if yoga happens to be your thing, and she is doing a workshop near you, GO. GO TO IT. Even if it happens to coincide with a holiday for your baby daddy. It was a fabulous weekend, and I think I lost about ten pounds of water weight from SWEAT.


Isn’t she gorgeous? Please ignore the beads of sweat all over my face.

Of course, it was Father’s Day weekend, and so I felt vaguely guilty about spending so much time away from the house – Happy Father’s Day! Now, take care of the kids all weekend. – so I tried to assuage my guilt by making this cake:


Isn’t it pretty? Those are chocolate covered strawberries, and the cake itself was chocolate, so it was pretty delicious, believe me. I also tried to overcome my guilt by insisting that he golf after he dropped the kids off at school on Friday, which was the first time ever he had done the drop-off; I had to deep breathe and remind myself that he is not actually an idiot, and no calamity would occur, and the kids would make it to their classrooms. I think I have some control issues in this area. I also insisted he golf Saturday night, which ended up being a hilarious comedy of errors.

You know when your kids pass out of a certain stage, say the stage of having meltdowns and tantrums, and so you are not actually used to a meltdown or tantrum, and then one occurs? Well, it so happened that Saturday was the boys’ final soccer tournament, which meant they played two one hour games in the suddenly gorgeous sunshine. I stopped by to see their second game on my lunch break and also happened to come across the soccer mom/coach from hell, which is a very long story and one for another day. It was a busy day and apparently a very tiring one for Jake, because shortly after dinner he started to lose it. Here is what the boys’ conversation was like for approximately one hour:

“MARK’S NOT LETTING ME HAVE A TURN!!!”

“Jake, I said you could have a turn. You’re having a turn right now.”

“BUT IT’S NOT A VERY LONG TURN! AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”

“Jake, you can KEEP having the turn.”

“BUT YOU SAID WE WERE LOOKING FOR LIONS AND I WANTED TO LOOK FOR MONKEYS!”

“Okay, we can look for monkeys.”

“I WANT TO LOOK FOR PENGUINS!”

And so on. Lather, rinse, repeat. Finally I decided to end whatever looking-for-exotic-animals-in-the-yard game they were playing and give them a bedtime snack and story. Everything was going wrong for Jake; he couldn’t spear blueberries with his fork without them squishing, he couldn’t decide on a story, he wanted to take toys into the bath but didn’t know what toys to take, he decided to take some superheroes and the entire box of superheroes slipped out of his hands, contents scattered on the floor. Then, while he was bathing, I made the grave mistake of letting Mark practice his reading with a Cars book. I heard a bloodcurdling scream from the bathtub and rushed in to see. “I’M MISSING STORIES!”

Sigh. When he finally got into bed – about 45 minutes earlier than normal – he passed out in seconds. I felt like I was out of touch with the tantruming world, I forgot what an overtired preschooler could be like. Do you know what I mean? Fortunately we are not having any more babies. I was using parenting muscles that I forgot I had; those muscles were sluggish and weak, but thankfully, as I discovered on Saturday, they are still there.

Everybody’s talking at me

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“I just wish I could one day watch the news in peace” my husband complained the other night, over the din of the kids playing and their varying sound effects. I emotionally answered that one day the kids would be gone and moved away and then it would be silent, and sad, and then he could watch the news without interruption. He replied with a curse which I will not repeat, and followed up with a comment to the effect that he wasn’t wishing the kids to move out, he was just wishing them to be slightly less loud for 30 minutes.

This is the fourth consecutive day of cold and rain, and the boys have been in astonishingly good spirits. They have played together, happily and without fighting, not even an argument – cue the chorus of singing angels – all afternoon. They have also been constantly talking all afternoon. I am not exaggerating when I say that there was not one minute of silence all afternoon. Not one minute. It was almost like the children are equipped with a chatter button, and it has been jammed into the “on” position, and the volume has been cranked to “maximum”. Even during activities that might be considered quiet activities, such as colouring and using the bathroom, there has been a constant stream of chatter, along with varying sound effects. Twice today I darted to the bathroom thinking Jake was calling for help, when he was actually just singing.

I’m not complaining though. The chatter has been pleasant enough, and has been nice background noise for my obsessive baking. I guess it’s the weather, but this week, in addition to my regular meal preparation, I have made the following: boule, granola, cinnamon loaf, banana bread, cookies, and three litres of roasted tomato sauce. It has been epic. I started off thinking that I will be out of the house most of the weekend, so perhaps I should prepare a few simple snacks for my husband to feed the kids. It then started to spiral out of control. Fortunately the rain is starting to taper off, as I’m running out of recipes. And room in the freezer.

Sports, honesty, and mating…what are those dinos doing?

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Saturday morning a loud buzzing noise filled my head. It kind of felt like a giant swarm of bees had invaded. I was puzzled; after all, I had only one glass of wine the night before and I didn’t feel ill or dizzy in any way. “Do you HEAR that?” I asked my husband hesitantly, somewhat worried that I was just going crazy or something. Turns out it was just the background noise, from the World Cup and those weird vuvuzelas.

I always thought my husband was a total sports nut, a junkie, but then I met some REAL sports nuts and not I realize that he is just a fan, someone who follows a lot of sports and could tell you who placed first and who choked and who set a record, for pretty much any sport from football and hockey to horse racing and Nascar. He only watches a few sports very closely: American football, which I enjoy watching to some degree, and golf, which I do not enjoy at all thanks to the monotone-voiced commentators (“…and here’s the chip shot out of the bunker. Oh. Nice shot. Now it’s a putt for birdie…”) and also anything international, like the Olympics or the World Cup.

Mark, perhaps due to his participation in community soccer, has taken an interest in the World Cup. “Do you think I could play in the World Cup one day?” he asked. How honest is too honest? It’s hard to find the balance between being truthful and breaking your child’s spirit. “Um, maybe if you practice really hard, you could,” is the response I went with.

But really, how honest are you with your children? My friend sent me this article, and I am not prudish, I don’t think, but I was absolutely creeped out by it. For one thing, Mr. Purple? That’s what you call it? For another thing, your child was touching your sex toy? Ew. I couldn’t even get past those two pieces of information. Maybe I’m more prudish than I think I am. Mark had gotten a dinosaur book from the library, and apparently it was meant for a much older child, as it had a picture of Allosauruses mating. Mating! What are those dinosaurs doing, Mom? Um, let’s turn the page and see! Look! Baby Allosauruses! I have a feeling this is not the last of it.

YAAAA-HOOOOOO!

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That’s what we say here in Calgary during Stampede time. For those of you who know Calgary, yes, I realize it is only June. BUT the kids’ school had a year-end party in the form of a Stampede Breakfast. For those of you who do not know Calgary, essentially in July during the Stampede everywhere you turn there are free pancake breakfasts complete with entertainment of varying quality. Also the entire city dons western wear, which can be a terribly frightening thing. I remember back in the day when I worked, certain colleagues – who just seemed like regular people – would show up to work wearing skintight Wranglers and shirts emblazoned with pictures of wolves howling at the moon, or a desert landscape at sunset. I’m not judging this particular style, although it is not my fashion cup of tea, but what I found alarming was that my regular, seemingly normal co-workers had whole other lives, ones that involved a lot of cowboy fantasies. A male colleague confessed that he had many, many sexual fantasies involving, of all things, rodeo trick riders and barrel racers. Two things: that is far too much information to have about someone with whom I had a working relationship, and also, I had no idea that rodeo competitors were a source of fantasy. I just didn’t know. I mean, schoolgirls, nurses, flight attendants…but trick riders? Someone might as well have told me that quantitative analysts were the bomb, that would have been just as startling. I was just totally taken aback by that information, and by the fact that a Stampede party and the accompanying drinks led to my reception of that information.

However, now that I’m not working, I’m always up for a good Stampede party, even one in June. The sun came out just in time; my kids could care less about the actual food, but there was a DJ who was playing such songs as YMCA and Who Let the Dogs Out. Who can stop their dancing feet with those tunes? I certainly cannot, and neither, apparently, can my kids:

Mark’s checking out the crowd, Jake is getting jiggy with it.


Mark’s starting to get into it.


Mark looks deflated. Jake is still grooving.


Maybe he was just resting. Check out the sweet moves! Jake, apparently, is embarking on his very own chicken dance.


This may be my all-time favourite picture of Mark. And really, is there anything better than disco dancing at 8:30 in the morning? Given my love of dancing and also my love of going to bed early, I can say with authority that it was a perfect party.