Category Archives: Uncategorized

Old at heart.

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I had a hair appointment this week – thank god, something had to be done about the orange straw and grey roots – and as I was getting my colour rinsed out, an older gentleman came into the salon. He explained that he was Marjorie’s son, Marjorie being an elderly lady who gets a weekly hairdo every Friday morning. He had never been in the salon before, but he drives Marjorie every week. What a good son! Except that he had made arrangements for her to go out of town to visit her granddaughter this Friday, which meant that all was ashes. How could he take her out of town with undone hair?

And so this gentleman was coming into the salon personally to see if there was any chance Marjorie could be squeezed in on Thursday. The salon I frequent is a busy one – I book my colours months in advance – but they accommodated his request. After he left, my hair therapist smiled and said, “Oh, those old ladies. They hate to have their schedules messed with. It ruins their whole week!” I nodded sympathetically, all the while thinking, I can relate.

You see, I am not elderly, and yet I too find myself getting worked up when my schedule is thrown out of whack. I can only imagine me in forty or fifty years. Changing a weekly hair appointment would be akin to burning down the nursing home or running out of hot water and lemon in the dining room. We don’t have much time left, I am not leaving this earth with messy hair.

Digression: what kind of food will they have in the Home in forty or fifty years? Will it be things that are trendy and popular now, like kale and quinoa, or will we all just start eating mashed potatoes and veal cutlets? I cannot imagine that I will ever tuck into a plate of veal cutlets, but what kind of vegetarian options will they have for the elderly, circa 2060? Also, will we all naturally just slide into Sears’ “pull on” slacks and blouses, or housedresses? Or will we be clinging to the styles we like now? Will we be a generation of skinny jean wearing, kale chip eating old people? Will I still wear coconut-scented lotion or will I just start wearing Lily of the Valley talcum powder? I’d like to think I’ll go straight to Chanel Number 5 but really, who can tell?

In any case, I don’t do well with schedule interruptions or changes. Case in point: the painters. We’ve been talking about painting the kitchen and bathrooms. We’ve had a colour consult with the painter who painted our basement and exterior. The only thing we didn’t have was a firm date. Sometime in early April, was what had been settled on, when we got an email from the painter saying that he might have to change that around. Well, we had nothing firm anyway, so I blithely went on with my life.

At least, until Tuesday night, when my husband informed me that the painters were coming the very next day at 9:00.

In retrospect, this was the best possible scenario. I had a meeting, but not until 11, the kids were staying for lunch for Tech Club, and I didn’t have time to work myself up into a frenzy about omg people working in the house! I was able to be home to let them in, the day was sunny and warm and so I could lock the dog outside, everything was fine. The colours turned out beautifully – photos to come – and as of Thursday morning everything was finished.

And yet. I am the crabbiest person to have people working in the house. Maybe it’s my Type A personality, which makes me feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest when I see drywall dust on the kitchen counters and tiny scraps of paint chips on the floor, and the furniture all askew. Maybe this is a sign that I need to look into my control-freak behaviour when I physically have to leave the room so that I don’t implode and wither to the floor when everything in the house is chaos and I cannot even get to my water bottle or use the bathroom without explaining myself.

Well, it’s all over now, and as I said, it’s beautiful. My husband claims not to be a Type A person, but he is quite a perfectionist, especially when it comes to handy work. He is very handy – if you’re not handy yourself, you are best to marry someone handy, is my motto – and has done a great deal of work in our house with his own two hands. He’s the ultimate “measure 20 times, cut once” guy, everything has to be exactly leveled and exactly centred and there is no eyeballing involved. MEASUREMENTS COUNT, PEOPLE. It works out great, because he is very exact. The only problem is that if someone ELSE does the work, then he can find fault in about thirty seconds flat. He’s the one who spots the tiny piece of roller fluff that got painted onto the wall, or the slightly-less-than-perfect paint line. And the biggest problem about this is that I am the one who is at home, so it is my job to inform the person working on our house that their work is suspect. I don’t like that job. There was a not-great job done in a not-too-prominent part of the bathroom which resulted in some coloured paint being on our cream trim, but my husband threw up his hands, decided he was going to just repaint the trim and door himself, because he could do a better job. This kind of defeats the purpose of getting painters in, but maybe it’s for the best.

Princess problems, am I right? I guess it’s time for me to work on my mental flexibility. Either that, or just continue with my deep ujjayi breathing.

Bringing Happy Home

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I flew in from Maui yesterday and boy, are my arms tired!

Sorry. I’m still pretty tired from a) flying the red eye on Monday night and b) dealing with an overtired child who was too tired to sleep last night and then had nightmares every hour or so that I’m having that weird thing where I don’t even really know what I’m doing. Yesterday I looked in the refrigerator for salt, for example, and I stared at the shelves for a good two minutes before I realized that on Planet Earth, we don’t refrigerate salt. I am less tired today – I’m not looking in the refrigerator for spices – but still in fog brain mode.

But who cares, right? I just spent twelve days in Maui and it was the best vacation we have ever had. Everything was perfect. Although it already feels like months ago when I was hanging out on the lanai drinking vodka and vitamin water:

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or wearing a giant hat

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or reassuring one of my children that the other one would not get close enough to a blowhole and get killed.

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So it’s back to reality, I guess. I’m trying to get back in the swing of things without complaining about the absence of palm trees or afternoon boozing. WHAT IS THIS BULLSHIT PLACE WITHOUT OCEAN BREEZES? It’s weird getting used to wearing socks and pants again, but here we are.

There’s been a lot of talk lately (forever?) about women wearing bikinis and getting your body bikini-ready and you know what? This was my fourth visit to Maui and I would say that 95% of the women on the beach are in bikinis, regardless of age or body shape. This is how it should be! I mean, really, look at men – they generally shirtless on the beach and we never, ever say a word about it. We don’t say “that guy has too big of a gut to wear those board shorts,” now, do we? Maybe we get a little weirded out when the elderly man wearing a brief-like swimsuit bends over near us and we see his testicles, but that doesn’t happen often (although when it does, we cannot unsee it). So why do we have a debate over whether or not women can wear bikinis?

From personal experience, I think bikinis are much more comfortable than any other kind of swimsuit. I’m kind of tall, and one-piece bathing suits never fit right. Tankinis don’t work for me for swimming because they ride up too much. So I opt for bikinis, although I’m less than three weeks away from being forty and the bottom part of my belly is a bit wrinkly from having babies and the “girls” are not what they used to be, believe me. But who cares? Why do we feel the need to look like Gisele Bundchen on the beach, or snark at other women for also not looking like Gisele Bundchen on the beach?

Maybe I’m feeling snappy today, but I’m making a vow, and that is to stop with the negativity. Not just for myself, but I’m no longer going to silently stand by while women tear down other women. We’d all love to be perfect, but no one is, and we aren’t going to get any closer to perfection by being mean and negative. Maybe, just maybe, instead of discussing someone’s flaws, we can inspire people to be better by discussing positive, happy things.

And on that note, I leave you with this: no makeup, swim hair, bug bite, and reapplied sunscreen. When I look at this photo, all I can think of is how happy I was at that very moment. xo

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 bikini

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The DST Edition

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Anyone else feeling a little tired this week? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Daylight Savings Time is one of the stupidest, most antiquated rituals in our society today. And if ONE PERSON says “it’s for the farmers,” you will be able to find me over there, warming up my slapping hand. That is all I am going to say about this topic, because I have said it all before. I will say this, though: for years, years my husband has been telling me that my complaints about time change are “overblown” and “silly” and this week he has been EXHAUSTED SO IN YOUR FACE, TIME CHANGE IS THE WORK OF THE DEVIL.

Anyway. I realized it’s been a few months since my last “Nicole’s Favourite Things” and I have so many favourite things lately (not Daylight Savings Time) that I need to share. Do I need to give my usual caveat? This is not sponsored, I am not being paid to write this, I did not receive anything for free, these are just things I love. Without further ado…

Nicole’s Favourite Things: The DST Edition

My Babies

Not the boys – although they ARE my very favourite things, but who wants to read about that? No, I’m talking about my new grow-light system and the plants that are referred to in my house as “my babies.” The babies are growing! I need to thin them out a bit more, but every time I do my husband says in a shocked voice, “You’re KILLING your babies?” and then he says, as I tentatively pluck a few out of the soil, “Mommy? Mommy? Why?”

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I’m hoping to be able to harvest the lettuce and arugula soon, but it looks like the herbs have a long way to go.

Gloves With Touch-Screen-Friendly Fingertips

Every winter, my hands get more and more painful as the months go on. I have enormous Canada Goose mittens, but they are so big and unwieldy I cannot do things like open doors or hold things while wearing them. The solution is to wear these thin little gloves underneath so I can unlock the house or – on the rare occasion someone phones me – answer my phone without the skin of my hands instantly freezing. Granted, this winter has been exceptionally mild – sorry, friends in the East! – but this thin glove/ thick mitten combination is a winner.

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I know, I have ginormous hands. These are men’s gloves, in a size large.

Baby Got Back Yoga Wear

It’s not really called that, it’s Lululemon, but these pants – their Skinny Groove pants – are hands down the most flattering and comfortable yoga pants I have ever had, and I have worn a lot of yoga pants in my time. Every time I put them on, I think Oh my god. Becky, look at her butt!

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And on the subject of yoga clothes, I bought this sweatshirt, made by Om Girl, and I am in love with it. It’s cozy and roomy enough for layers, which is exactly what I want in a sweatshirt. Also, it’s kind of blingy, which I like.

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Hey, do you like my hair?

Hair Products

Years ago I tried using Pantene products and they left my hair very limp and kind of greasy, which turned me off them for nearly two decades. Recently though, someone (HI CARA) mentioned Pantene and I thought I might give it another try. Hey, I’m not twenty anymore, my hair is processed and fried and maybe I should give it another try.

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I’ve been using these alternately with my favourite Organix Coconut products and I tell you, I’ve been having fabulous hair days. This is notable because I normally do not have even “good” hair days, let alone “fabulous” ones. Maybe it’s the combination of the two products; remember way back in the day when Neutrogena launched a whole line of shampoos that were supposed to make your favourite shampoo work better? Talk about great marketing: don’t give up your favourite shampoo, just use these Neutrogena ones for ten days out of the month and LOOK HOW MUCH BETTER YOUR HAIR WILL BE. That’s pretty clever, but maybe there is something to switching around the same old, same old. In any case, I’ve been happy with the results. I also am using this sweet little product:

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It makes my hair nice and soft, and it smells like coconut, which is my favourite.

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This is my hair today, on just a regular Tuesday in March. I guess the moral of the story is that Pantene didn’t work for me back in my twenties, but now that I’m t-6 weeks until 40, I’m really seeing results.

Note: the lipgloss I’m wearing in the photo is Daniel Thompson #1 The Gloss, and it is the best neutral gloss I have ever found. I am honoured to call the talented Daniel Thompson my friend – his high-end makeup is the best quality around.

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Nicole Nail Polish

While we’re talking beauty products, I love the Nicole line by OPI. For one, it has my name on it. For another, the nail polish is long-lasting and they have great colours. The shades I’m wearing on my fingernails and toenails are both from the “Carrie Underwood” collection, which for some reason makes me smile. The Sally Hanson Insta-Dri is a really great top coat and it dries everything quickly, so you don’t have to worry about putting your socks back on after you’ve given yourself a pedicure. I mean, if that’s something you worry about.

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Routine De-Odor-Cream

The moment you’ve all been waiting for – when I tell you about the virtues of natural deodorant. Longtime readers will remember me waxing poetically about my friend Neige and her deodorant business. It took me a while before I could bring myself to try it, because I didn’t want to smell like a feral hippie. People, Routine De-Odor-Cream is the most effective natural deodorant. It lasts me a solid twenty-four hours, and that includes a 90 minute Ashtanga yoga practice. Even AFTER a sweaty yoga practice and twenty-four hours of wear I pass the sniff test – no feral hippies! I like all their scents, as you can see…

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But what I want to talk about is their newest scent: Like A Boss. It smells like a fresh soap, it’s a new creamy formulation, and you need it in your life! Check it out at routinecream.com.

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Shamrock Shakes

With St. Patrick’s Day fast approaching, I made this healthy version of a Shamrock Shake for Yummy Mummy Club, and I’ve been having one almost every day since then. It’s so nice and minty, which makes me feel refreshed all day long. I highly recommend it!

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I think that covers it! All my latest favourite things – now, won’t you share yours? What are you loving these days? xo

You don’t have to go home but you can’t park here.

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I’m going out on a limb here, but I would venture to say that if you polled any random number of parents and asked them what issue do you hate the most about the school your children attend, most of them would say the parking. The ones that wouldn’t say parking would be the ones whose children are bussed to school and who do not have to endure the daily clusterfuck of school drop-offs and pick-ups.

We have 600 students at our school, and many of them come via bus. A few walk, and a lot are driven. We do a mixture of walking and driving, depending on weather conditions and what I’m doing after I drop off the kids. When I drive, I park about a block away, and we walk. It works well because I avoid the insanity that is parking close to the school: people will make u-turns in the middle of the very busy street, in front of oncoming traffic, just to get a spot near the school. They park across the street and then jaywalk into busy traffic, rather than walking the extra thirty seconds – literally, thirty seconds – to the crosswalks on either side of the front of the school. This month’s school newsletter had a whole section on “please do not park in the school bus zones” because that is actually something that needs to be told to people. Don’t drop your precious snowflake off in the bus zone because BUSES ARE USING THAT ZONE. We all have precious snowflakes, let’s model good behaviour by not a) parking like an asshole, b) turning u-turns in the middle of a busy road like an asshole, c) jaywalking across the busy street while also holding babies and small children like an asshole.

And then the alley, my god, the alley. The alley beside the school is filled, constantly, with people parked on either side, creating a narrow one-lane passage. People park on blind corners and in no-stopping zones, because they are too damn lazy to park elsewhere. I feel sorry for the people who live there because people are always parking in front of garage doors and on garbage days, the garbage trucks get stuck in the melee.

Since the kids come home at lunch, I usually drive through the alley. I park in a legal zone, wait for them to come out, and drive them home. Always, always, there are people parked in insanely illegal ways further down the alley. These are kindergarten parents who are letting their kids have a little playtime on the playground before taking them home. Every single day, I fume a little as I slowly drive past the cars parked on either side of the corner, which makes a terrible blind spot in which I cannot see oncoming traffic. Kids pop in and out of the playground, which makes me nervously drive about 3 km/ hr. Yes, I could change my own behaviour, but the kids come out of their respective doors, run to the car, and we go home. In a perfect world, I would be able to drive through the alley normally. And until this year, I did. This year, every day I think that if there were bylaw officers around the school, they’d make their fiscal year in about two days.

Then yesterday, I saw a man parked on the wrong side of the road, on a corner, in the no-stopping zone. It was like the trifecta of illegal parking. He was in his car, on his phone, while – I assume – his kindergartener played on the playground equipment. And I don’t know if it was the full moon or the fact that the guy was too lazy to get out of his damn car and do his internet-surfing on the playground bench in the sunshine, or if I had just been pushed too far, but I thought, goddammit, I am the Chair of the School Council and this is unsafe and I AM GOING TO CONFRONT THIS MAN. Those of you who know me know how very unlikely it is for me to actually confront someone, rather than ujjayi breathing and thinking he had a good reason to do what he did.

I drove over there – with kids in the car, on the way home for lunch – and gestured to him to roll down his window. He did so, and I said, politely and perkily, that he wasn’t allowed to park there. “Well, where am I supposed to park then?” he asked me, and I just looked at him for a moment. Blink. Blink. I said he could park anywhere that wasn’t illegal, and pointed out the no-stopping sign that he was RIGHT BESIDE. “Oh, so none of these cars are supposed to park here?” he said a tad bit belligerently. Well, I said, not the ones that are parked between the signs that indicate NO STOPPING. Reading comprehension: it’s a skill we can all work on. We stared at each other for a moment, and then I felt an impasse had been reached. I shrugged, said that I thought I should let him know, and drove away.

Last night I was waiting for the kids at karate and got an email from the school. It outlined, in detail, alley parking bylaws! I didn’t even complain to the school; I didn’t bring it up, I didn’t make any phone calls, IT JUST HAPPENED THIS WAY. I guess I’m not the only one who broke.

Take The Wheel

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This afternoon marks the fourteenth book fair that I will set up. A few weeks ago I was dragging, thinking about it, when a few friends told me I should go back and read my post-book fair blog posts. It worked! I was motivated once again by the thought of happy kids, a happy school librarian, and my fleeting moment in the sun as the Book Fair Lady. This will be my fifth-to-last book fair that I will run in my life, so I guess I better make them count. One day, there will be no more questions about the cost of posters (FIVE DOLLARS) or if a cake pop-shaped pen is edible, or if I can order the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid. And, just like the day I realized that the kids no longer crawl into my bed and wake me up on Saturday mornings, it will be bittersweet.

The task associated with the book fair that I dread most is photocopying, cutting, sorting, and distributing the little forms for the school-wide draw. It is a task that takes literally less than thirty minutes to complete but it hangs over me like a heavy black cloud. It’s not unlike how making a phone call for a dentist appointment is almost worse than the appointment itself. Oh my god, I have to pick up the PHONE and decide on a TIME and what if they have no good times AVAILABLE…

But happily the photocopying was done last week, I have my dream team of volunteers helping with everything this week (HI VOLUNTEERS IF YOU ARE READING THIS) and, as a bonus, it’s almost March! March is, as Pa Ingalls says with great cheer and terrible foreboding in The Long Winter, spring!

NOTE: March is not spring. But it is a happy kind of month, right? More sunshine, my wedding anniversary, Mark’s birthday, spring break…

Did you watch the Oscars last night? I did, although I haven’t seen any of the movies and, in fact, am so out of the loop that I don’t even know who 90% of the people are. I mean, I can still pick out Oprah and Stedman, and I was delighted to discover (two minutes before the show started) that Neil Patrick Harris was hosting. I know who Emma Stone is because I’ve seen her in a few movies and she was the actress who would play me in the movie version of my life, according to a Buzzfeed quiz I did a long time ago. Not only have I not seen the movies, I didn’t even know what movies were nominated or even vaguely what said movies are about. The one exception was Boyhood, and the only thing I really know about it is that it took twelve years to make. I read a review on Swistle’s blog and decided that it wasn’t for me. I don’t want to watch anything that might be upsetting.

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I don’t know who this Jesus-lookalike is behind Patricia Arquette, but may I suggest “Jesus, Take The Wheel” as an alternate caption?

Apparently I’m okay with reading upsetting things, however, since I just finished The Goldfinch. I’d heard a lot of rave reviews about it, and I will say this: it is an extremely well written book with some very good plot twists. It did not end the way I expected, which I like in a book. However – and this will make me sound like a square, but hey, I am one – there is way too much drug usage in this book, in a gross, graphic way. NO ONE needs to read about that much vomit.

I needed a literary palate-cleanser after finishing The Goldfinch, so I dug out my old, ratty copy of Elvis and Me. Man, that is a bizarre story. Can you imagine being the parents of a fourteen-year-old girl who starts dating twenty-four-year-old Elvis Presley? And can you imagine being Elvis’ living doll who wears what he says to and develops a personality based on what he wants? It’s a strangely compelling story, one I read many times in my youth. I highly recommend it as light reading if you’ve just finished a depressing epic of a novel. It’s worth it just to look at photos like this:

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The styles of the Sixties! How long do you think it would take her to wash and comb out that hair? That really puts my Eighties bangs to shame, I must say.

She took it to the limit. She should have taken it easy.

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Completely inconsistent with my last post, I cannot stop laughing at this headline:

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Frankly, I thought there was no way the actual story could live up to the headline, but it turns out that it does. The woman – who clearly lost her Peaceful Easy Feeling – kept pleading with her roommate to turn off the Eagles, and when he refused, she took a serrated knife and stabbed him several times in the arm.

“It’s unclear which of the band’s songs drove Bader over the edge, but police have narrowed down the possible suspects to “Witchy Woman”, “Take It Easy”, “Peaceful Easy Feeling”, “Take It To The Limit”, “One of These Nights”, “Tequila Sunrise”, and “Hotel California” on repeat.”

My money’s on Hotel California.

It’s noted that the suspect and victim were intoxicated at the time. You don’t say? I just feel relieved that my roommate never stabbed me in the summer of 1998 when I played Aretha Franklin’s Greatest Hits on repeat, and sang along. Call me…call me…call me the moment you get there, baby baby baby.

I needed this laugh today because yesterday I very nearly had a nervous breakdown in Michael’s craft store, saved only by “Cake Decorating For Dummies” texts from my very patient friend Liv (HI LIV). It was my New Year’s resolution to learn how to decorate cupcakes not by merely piling on frosting with a butter knife. Yesterday I dropped the kids at karate and drove over to Michael’s, to pick up some decorating tools, only to become immediately frozen with panic the second I walked through the door. That place is overwhelming. I literally stood at the door staring like a deer in headlights for a solid five minutes while women – because the clientele was exclusively female – zipped around me with purpose and knowledge, grabbing scrapbooking supplies and fabric flowers. After five minutes of blank staring I located the cake decorating section and was frozen, again. Do you have any idea how many different varieties of decorating tips there are? I stood in an aisle with dozens of them in front of me, taunting me with their slight differences. Finally I texted Liv for help, and it’s lucky I did, because I’d probably still be there, crying in the cake decorating aisle while people stepped around me to grab fondant scissors and cake levellers.

My feeling of being completely out of my element was not unlike my teenage experiences of going to the fabric store with my mother. My poor, long-suffering mother. She probably wondered what she did to deserve such a daughter. My mother is one of those people who you might refer to as someone who “knows her way around a sewing machine” and she was cursed with a daughter who once, when attempting to sew a button on a pair of pants, cut a giant hole in the seat of the pants and then accidentally sewed the pants together. For a button. The best case scenario for me is to attach a button with a less than one inch wad of thread jammed behind the button, the worst case scenario is the one in which I am sobbing because I have destroyed a pair of pants. I am not gifted in the sewing arts, and yet there I was, taking Sewing in Home Economics for three straight years. My mother had to take me to Fanny’s Fabrics, armed with a t-shirt pattern and instructions on things to buy; she bustled around, finding the thread and material and ribbing, while I followed dutifully, feeling like I landed on a different planet, one where people had opinions on McCall’s versus Butterick. These people knew how to thread a serger, and meanwhile I spent my Home Ec classes pulling out the stitches I had made, the crooked seams and the stitches that sewed the neck or sleeves together, until my t-shirt was entirely full of little tiny holes and I had to borrow a friend’s extra ribbing just to cover it up somewhat. I’m sure I only passed the class because my teacher wanted me out of the Home Ec system as soon as possible.

Reminiscing is so fun, isn’t it? Allison, Hannah, and I enjoy it so much that we started a whole new blog based entirely on reminiscences from our youth. Visit us over at Throwing It Back – new posts every Thursday about our varied memories of our wayward (and not-so-wayward) youths. So far, Hannah is reminiscing about Harriet’s Magic Hats – which, to be honest, I have never heard of but it sounds kind of amazing in a 1980s way – and I have my first of three posts up about Deenie. Remember Deenie? The book that made us all secretly long for a back brace.

Today is Friday the 13th! Be sure to avoid all black cats/ walking under ladders/ smashing mirrors. I’m not normally very superstitious but our spring broke on our garage door today, which feels a bit ominous. Only a bit, though. Because, after all, tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and I wish for every single one of you one of these:

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Happy Valentine’s Day, lovelies. Remember, even if your loved one plays Witchy Woman over and over again, it’s best not to stab them, even if you are intoxicated.

Theoretical People

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This morning I baked 97 sugar cookies, and they are sitting on my counter, nakedly waiting for a layer of pink buttercream and an assortment of heart sprinkles. Twenty-eight of them are circles, cut out from a plastic cup, and the rest are hearts; this is due to one of my children being desperate to bring cookies to his Valentine’s Day class, but way too cool for them to be heart-shaped, deemed by him to be “lame”. This does not stop him from wanting pink buttercream and heart-shaped sprinkles, however, and it hasn’t stopped him from eating three of the naked heart-shaped cookies.

Sunday morning I checked the online school messages, and was startled to discover that there is a bake sale at the school this week for Division Two children, and that donations were much needed. I spent a chunk of the day baking monster cookies filled with mini-eggs, and brownies covered with melted chocolate chips and sprinkles, just so the boys would be able to contribute. The sacrifices we make for our kids! Or, in my case, the enormous amount of dishwashing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately – not baking, but sacrifices and decisions we make for our children. There’s a lot of buzz right now about disease resurgences, and vaccinations, and in my mind these things are not up for debate at all. There are clear facts, and there are clear outcomes, and there are also lots of grey areas that are not debatable, exactly, but that incite a great deal of anger.

It’s funny; we leave the hospital with our newborns in their car seats, or maybe the midwife leaves our house with her giant collapsible birthing tub, whatever, but here we are with our firstborn babies, that we know virtually nothing about. We’re suddenly the experts, and we try to go with maternal instinct, and we read every single child rearing book there is, from What to Expect to Babywise to The Baby Whisperer to The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, and they all have different viewpoints and every little thing seems so important and so difficult. We’re expected to just make monumental decisions about what’s best for our babies, and we do this, trusting in research and reading and instincts. We all do the best we can, but sometimes things are cloudy and we’re not sure what that “best” is.

And nothing gets us, as parents, upset like the thought that we are NOT doing the best, that we are NOT making the best decisions, and maybe this is why the vaccination discussion – not debate – is so heated. We make a decision, and our kids are depending on us to make the best decision for them. Nothing makes a parent feel worse than the implication that we did the wrong thing. I gave up breastfeeding much earlier than I had initially planned, and although it felt like the right decision at the time, I have always questioned it, all these years later. But if you were to say to me, oh, maybe you could have done better if you only did x, or maybe you could have breastfed longer if you had this kind of support, well, I would be furious. I would probably cry with anger and sadness and frustration. But the decision was made, the milk factory was closed, and all these years later, it doesn’t really matter to anyone except me.

So I can imagine how someone might feel if, say, they declined the MMR vaccine for their child who later, on a sweet trip to Disneyland, ended up with the measles. And if that case of measles happened to be one that had complications, well. I can imagine how that parent might feel.

Personally, I very much dislike when my children get sick, even when it’s just a cold I find it to be a pain. At the very least, it’s inconvenient: kids have to miss school and activities, we go through a lot of tissues, and then we are fine. I do everything in my power to keep them healthy: we take vitamins and eat healthy foods, we drink lots of water and get proper rest, we wash our hands all the time, but occasionally we still get sick. If there is a way for me to opt out of them getting really sick, then I am going to take that option.

When I was a kid my mother took me to chicken pox parties, which is what people did back then. I never did get the chicken pox until I was nineteen years old, and when you are nineteen years old, the chicken pox is certainly no picnic. It’s pretty terrible to get a so-called childhood disease when you are an adult. It was just before Christmas final exams in my second year of university, and I have never been so sick in my life, before or since. The memory of that meant that when I was pregnant, almost ten years later, and I found out there was a vaccine for chicken pox, I didn’t even have to think twice.

Jake got the chicken pox vaccine at the same time that he got the MMR vaccine, at age one. A week after that he developed a mild case of the sniffles, and after that he had a mild vaccine reaction that I had been warned about, fever and rash. The combination was a bit much for him and he developed a double ear infection. Neither child had had an ear infection prior to this, and as I rocked him and walked with him and listened to him scream and scream and scream, I realized that I was out of my element. I didn’t know what to do. I took him to the emergency room at three in the morning, absolutely exhausted, and got the diagnosis at five in the morning: ear infection. The doctor gave him an antibiotic and a shot of codeine, and told me that I would be able to go home and get some rest. At that, I burst into hysterical sobbing because I had a two year old at home, and he would be awake for the day in short order, and god, I was tired.

In the end, Jake was fine, but I wouldn’t want to relive that. You can imagine I was pretty nervous to take him for his boosters prior to kindergarten, but I did it anyway. He did not have a reaction, he was fine.

One year I got the flu shot. The year prior, when the boys were 2 and 3, we all had the flu. It took me several weeks to get over it, and taking care of small children while having the flu was overwhelmingly awful. I got the flu shot, and I remember clearly the feeling of my entire arm slowly going numb, right down to my middle finger and up, up, up past my shoulder and into my ear and neck. I casually mentioned this to the nurse and the look of horror on her face is etched in my brain. I never got another flu shot; the kids and I take some homeopathic flu protocol in the fall, we wash our hands, we take our vitamins, and we haven’t had the flu since then. Clearly, I’m fine. But sometimes people aren’t fine when they get vaccines, and I think that glossing over that is not okay. We cannot dismiss the fact that even with the miracle that is modern medicine, sometimes things go wrong.

The thing about the vaccine discussion is that I know people whose children have had vaccine-related injuries, but I know even more people who have had issues with the diseases themselves. I know people who had polio, people whose family members lost their hearing due to measles, people who almost died or did die from pertussis. I know people whose children had seizures from chicken pox complications, and I know people whose children are growing up with health issues directly related to side effects from what is often dismissed as “normal childhood diseases”. All of those people – the ones harmed by the disease and the ones harmed by the vaccine itself – are of great importance to someone.

My friend Swistle recently wrote about her son, who has Crohn’s disease. Because of his Crohn’s, he needs to be on medication that suppresses his immune system; this allows him to thrive and grow, but it also means, obviously, that his immune system cannot fight off viruses. Swistle wrote about other people’s children being theoretical, but that those children are not theoretical to their families and friends, and that idea has stuck in my head. Some people can contract “normal childhood diseases” and end up just fine, but some people cannot. There were 122,000 measles deaths worldwide in 2012, and it’s perhaps easy to say well, those are mostly in developing countries, who knows what would happen if there was clean water and sanitation, but the fact is those people all had families. They are not theoretical people, they are actual people. They are actual people who died from a disease that is preventable.

My children are blessedly healthy. But there are many people who are not; people like Swistle’s son, people like my father-in-law who is undergoing cancer treatment, people like my friend’s daughter who has many health issues. And these people might not be important in your life, but they are important in someone’s life. We are part of a society, and the kind of society I want to be in is one that thinks about other people, one that thinks that other people matter, if not to you personally, then to someone. The kind of society I want to live in is one that recognizes that while 122,000 deaths from measles worldwide might seem minor as a percentage of the whole, people are not theoretical numbers, and each and every death means something to someone else. Each and every child that gets ill matters to someone. No one is theoretical.