I don’t know about you, but I am completely overwhelmed by the situation in Haiti. The images I have viewed are so incredibly unbelievable to me – people using their hands to pull bodies out of concrete rubble because of the total lack of heavy machinery, blocked roads, looted food supplies. Not to mention the children. I am just feeling completely overwhelmed by it.

For those of you in Canada, the Canadian government is matching donations up to a maximum of $50 million. Some companies, my husband’s being one of them, are also matching employee donations. Every little bit counts.

I just received some tragic news about a neighbourhood family. Please send thoughts and prayers their way. I am going to hug my kids and vow to be grateful for everything I have.

Mark ran in his very first Terry Fox run yesterday. It was such a gorgeous sunny day and it was so inspiring to see the kids bringing in Toonies for Terry, running their hearts out, proudly collecting their hand stamps for each lap completed. Privately I looked at the size of the field and wondered how many laps the kindergarteners would actually complete, but Mark ran seven, and I was so proud of him.

The remainder of the day, predictably, was spent discussing Terry Fox’s legacy. I don’t know about you, but I really struggle with finding a balance between being honest without being frightening, especially at this age, where kids tend to be so black and white. I myself was the type of child who would focus on imminent disaster and worst-case scenarios. I clearly recall Fire Safety Week at my elementary school, when a visiting firefighter casually mentioned a statistic that all Canadians would at some point be affected by a fire in their lives. He may as well have told me that my house was going to burn down tomorrow. I was terrified about fire for years after and had frequent nightmares. I also have a major thing for firefighters. Is it the uniform? The ability to save people? The bravery? I don’t know, but hubba hubba.

Back to the subject at hand. How do you talk to young children about death and illness? I told them that when Terry Fox was doing the Marathon of Hope, people gave him money which he then used to help sick people. The questions kept coming all day, including “How did he get cancer?” I had been fairly clear and honest about all previous questions, but that one threw me. I tried to focus on his heroism, but I found it impossible to keep from getting teary-eyed.

Terry Fox was someone’s son, someone’s baby. He was a true hero. Later, I watched the boys in the back yard running laps, playing “Terry Fox Run”, I looked at their healthy bodies, their healthy legs, and I cried with gratitude.

Alert! I am going to talk about the weather! I have become your grandma and I’m going to discuss the current weather conditions!

We are having a heat wave! In Calgary! In September! It’s glorious, I tell you. Other than spotting my neighbour shirtless, it has been one lovely day. For one thing, we are all back to our normal state of health, which is pretty nice. For another, I am wearing Capri pants, sandals, and a sleeveless top and it is SEPTEMBER! Given we had frost on Monday, that feels extremely luxurious, like if I wasn’t actually in my own house on a residential street, I might think that I had somehow hopped on a plane to somewhere exotic. Or at least somewhere that has pleasant weather conditions.

We spent the afternoon at a friend’s house. You know what’s really nice? When your friend’s kids are your kid’s friends. It makes a lovely playdate when you can catch up with a friend and your children are not squalling in the background, or asking when it’s time to go home, or some other such scenario.

So we had a lovely day, complete with sprinkler and sandbox, and despite the fact that the leaves are falling with rapidity, and there are frost warnings in the five-day forecast, I could pretend it was still summer.

The thing about back-to-school is all the back-to-illness that seems to come with it. “Hey, Mom!” Mark said gleefully, “You’ll never believe it! The school has water fountains and I can drink from them whenever I want to!” For someone like me – and I say this without pride – the knowledge that Mark has been drinking out of a public fountain practically necessitates the consumption of a tranquillizer. I could almost visualize the germy viruses entering his body via the water fountain. What I’m saying is that I have a teensy bit of a germ phobia. And by teensy bit, of course, I mean that I’m having a love affair with hand sanitizer. I love hand sanitizer so much, I want to take it out back behind a middle school and get it pregnant. On that note, anyone know when the season premiere of 30 Rock is on?

Anyway, Mark has been in school for almost a month and is sick, again. The first time was a very minor case of the sniffles, and the second time – the current incident – was a cold that morphed into a gross, hacking cough. It was worse on the weekend, but this morning he woke up pale and hollow eyed and said he wasn’t sure he could go to school today.

And I let him stay home!

By 9:30 he was playing happily with his brother, coughing only sporadically and making me feel like I just allowed my five-year-old to play hooky.

It seems that I have two little Nicoles on my shoulders: one who thinks, austerely, that unless a child is vomiting, feverish, or completely incapacitated, he should attend his learning institution without fail. The other one thought about all the other pale, coughing, hollow-eyed kindergarteners lined up for class and thought maybe everyone deserves a sick day now and then.

It’s a hard call, this middle ground. I mean, I don’t want to send a slightly sick child to school and then have it morph into a massive, feverish illness that makes me feel completely negligent, not to mention responsible for the infection of all his classmates, but I feel silly keeping home a slightly sick child who becomes, apparently, JUST FINE. I guess the latter scenario has much less dire consequences. Anyway, I will chalk this up to a day of rest and send him to school tomorrow – because the other Nicole? The little austere one on my shoulder? She’s killing me!

Saturday morning I saw my neighbours – a younger couple with no children – loading up their vehicle to go hiking in the mountains. I felt odd, like I was viewing some strange yet familiar ritual from another country that I used to inhabit. My husband and I used to head out nearly every weekend to the mountains, with our hiking boots and backpacks filled with extra clothes, water, and a lunch. We would choose a hike from a guidebook, and it would usually be around 10 km in length, and after that we would stop in a pub on the way home for a beer and dinner. It was a part of our lives, the lives we had before children.

We took the kids and the dog to the mountains for a “hike” this summer. I wore sandals, and we walked a total of less than one kilometer.

I knew a number of people who, while pregnant, were firm in the belief that the impending baby was not going to change their lives. Not at all. They would still travel to exotic destinations, work slave-like hours at their jobs, maintain rigorous levels of athleticism, and do all the same things on weekends that they did before. Their lives would be exactly the same, but there would be a baby with them to live those lives.

To me, this way of thinking indicates either extreme fear of the unknown or extreme stupidity. Things change. To imply that a person, a baby no less, will not have any impact on your life is disrespectful. I read a beautiful piece by the lovely Beck, who said, “…we change and our hearts change right along with us”. That resonated with me as I do feel like my heart has changed, it has opened in a way that it couldn’t before. I won’t be that girl with the hiking boots and guidebook again, and although sometimes I think her with longing, I wouldn’t change places with her for anything.

I’m having one of those “It’s already Wednesday?” type of Wednesdays. Because, in addition to mooning about Jake’s birth, there is his actual birthday to prepare for, which is in six days, but also not one but TWO birthday parties this weekend, one of which involves eight children aged five and under and a clown, and also there are cupcakes to make and a cake to order and sugar cookie dough to prepare and groceries to shop for and sugar cookies to bake and decorate, and we all know that decorating things is not my forte, and volunteer committee meetings, already, and a movie screening to attend. Did I mention that I was an extra in a movie? Well, that movie is being screened this weekend, right after the clown leaves our house and (I can only imagine) the children will collapse from their sugar high, but I may never be in a movie again so to the screening I must go.

So that outlines my next six days.

The birthday party thing is the bane of my existence. It all stems from my complete incompetence with cake decorating and my lack of creativity and imagination, which leads to canvassing people for ideas and trolling the internet at all hours. I have a new friend, who is amazing with birthday party ideas, and uses words like “fondant” and “royal icing” whilst I use words like “cake mix” and “creamy deluxe versus whipped”. Just saying.

Also, and this has nothing to do with birthday parties or the many, many volunteer committees I’m suddenly on, but I almost broke my nose yesterday! It was a lovely Calgary day with winds gusting 70 km/hour, I was parked on a slight angle, I was opening the car door and a wasp flew in my face. I brushed it away while letting go of the car door and smash! Door in my face. Fortunately I was wearing sunglasses, which took the brunt of it. I don’t even have a black eye, which I think would have made me look like the tough mom in the neighbourhood, and would have probably circumvented my appearance on any more volunteer committees.