Category Archives: Weather or not

Talk me down, baby.

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So it seems like a LOT of us like the Canadian boys! This is a point of national pride! Thanks for all the comments, I absolutely loved them. They reminded me of the many, many crushes I had in my long-vanquished youth: Judd Nelson, Michael Hutchence, Mark Wahlberg, Han Solo. Check, check, check, CHECK. Speaking of Michael Hutchence, in my days as an INXS fan, I would listen to Need You Tonight incessantly, and my mother was always completely repelled by it. “For God’s sake, Nicole,” she would say as I would rewind the cassette in the car, “What kind of PERSON says ‘You make me sweat’? That’s disgusting.” “Oh MOTHER” I would reply impatiently, “You just don’t GET IT.” This I would say while tightly rolling up my acid washed jeans and tossing my spiral permed hair, just to solidify my position as a sophisticated woman of the world.

So how was your weekend? Please tell me you did something exciting, because this was the highlight of mine: getting the carpets cleaned. Last week I was in despair about our filthy and disgusting carpet, and I just could not live another minute with our filthy and disgusting carpet, and so the carpet cleaner came and our carpet does not look significantly different, leaving me to the disheartening conclusion that our carpet’s life is at its end. We have lived in this house for ten years and have done many, many renovations. When we purchased this house it had a) a main floor that had been painted Pepto Bismol pink, which clashed jarringly with the rust coloured rock fireplace, b) trim and doors that had been painted a shiny, dark forest green, c) a kitchen with five different patterns of wallpaper and homemade cupboards that were constantly getting stuck and jammed, and d) a bathroom with dark brown fixtures. Classy! So we have done a lot of renovations, and now it looks like we are going to get rid of our carpet altogether and I am NOT looking forward to the upheaval. I become horribly crabby when the house is in more chaos than usual. I’m tense just thinking about it. I AM looking forward to not having filthy, disgusting carpet, however, so I’m trying to look at the big picture, rather than the (hopefully) 48 hour picture.

The filthy, disgusting carpet is not being helped by the fact that it’s raining and cold, again, and the dog is lending a lovely wet-dog aroma to the house in addition to his wet paw prints. Last January, when I was feeling particularly down, I came up with the brilliant idea to paint our living room blue! And the kitchen orange! Such happy colours, no one could be sad with a blue and orange house! My husband was fairly silent on the subject, cognizant of my distaste for chaos and confident that I would eventually come to the conclusion that I would rather live with taupe and butter yellow than tape up the cupboards, cover all the furniture, wash the walls, and paint. He was right. But with all the rain right now I’m starting to feel like blue might not be such a bad idea…no. NO. Someone talk me down off my rainy weather ledge, please, before I do something drastic. Like paint my kitchen orange.

Octopuses or Octopii?

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I’ve spent whole chunks of the day staring out the window at the sheets of rain pounding my already hail-flattened garden, popping Vitamin D capsules in an attempt to stave off a grey sky and petal-less flower induced depression, avoiding the front window where I have a clear view of my shirtless neighbour’s yard, where he had, inexplicably, piled a very large pile of topsoil on his lawn several weeks ago, this pile of topsoil having turned into an unsightly mud mountain.

Mark, very cheerily, announced this morning that the great thing about rainy days is that we don’t have to put on sunscreen!

That’s true, and that’s one way to look at things. Putting sunscreen on the kids is not what it once was: essentially chasing them through the house, with a handful of SPF 45, shrieking at them to hold still and wrestling them to the ground while applying it to a child who apparently has mistaken sunscreen for boiling oil and is screaming appropriately. Now, the boys do allow me to apply sunscreen in a painless, tear-free way, but not without a constant stream of complaints and sighing. I do like Mark’s look-on-the-bright-side approach.

Because I am evidently a masochist, I like to visit a website called Rhythm of the Home. It’s such a lovely website, with inspiring crafty ideas, which I have no hope of recreating. Really, the rhythm of my home is much less melodic. The rhythm of my house is more based on Dinosaurs: Meat Eaters Chomping the Plant Eaters, or Bakugan Battle Brawlers versus Ben 10 Aliens, or Mom I Accidentally Destroyed Something. However, I occasionally strive to be a crafty, artistic mother, and I know what you’re going to say. Enough already, Nicole. Enough. You will never be that crafty, artistic mother. And you would be right.

I saw this craft, making a yarn octopus, and I thought it looked fairly simple, fairly straightforward. So this morning, in anticipation of the need for rainy day activities, I bought some yarn and some felt. My parents popped by for a visit this afternoon and my mother spied the giant ball of yarn and looked at me quizzically. “Are you going to try to KNIT something?” she asked calmly and clearly, the way you might speak to someone in a hostage situation.

Here is the result of my best effort in octopus making.

Mark named his Moppy. Jake named his Bum.


I asked Jake if I should make a face on his octopus. He said, “I don’t really think you should. I like him with no face.” I feel judged.


Moppy and Bum, getting ready for their Heart and Soul duet.

There goes the garden

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Q: What’s better than a good friend?
A: A good friend who has kids that get along with your kids.

Today a friend and I took our kids to an amusement park, which my poor deprived children had never visited before. In fact, not only had they never visited that amusement park, which is located less than thirty minutes from my house, they had never in their lives visited any amusement park. One huge benefit of depriving your children of childhood delights is that they are incredibly excited to finally partake in them. They were so! thrilled! with all the various rides and games and cotton candy, which they had never before tasted. Since coming home, they have incessantly discussed the roller coaster, the log ride, and have eaten their way through a giant bag of cotton candy. They also enjoyed the little airplane ride.

So we had a fabulous time, until the sky turned black and the thunder started. We left the park for home, and returned just before this happened:

What’s that on the ground? Hail.


That was my pretty new rosebush.

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.

Happy (almost) Birthday Canada!

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Since in our house, birthdays must always be marked by cake, I am in the process of making an angel food cake with strawberry cream filling, the colours a nod to our lovely, lovely flag. My mother-in-law made this particular cake for me eleven years ago, and it instantly became my favourite dessert. All other desserts can just go home, for all I care. We don’t need you here.

We’re getting into our summer groove. The first few days were a bit strained, as they can be when your kids have spent a month with non-stop exciting end-of-school events and suddenly it’s the end of school and the days are just waiting to be filled. We seem to have gotten over the hump, as it were, and have been having the kind of days one just loves to write about. Trips to the playground! Picnics! Bike riding! A sunny afternoon at the wading pool! It feels all wholesome, and happy, and like I could do this for the rest of my life. Of course, now that I’ve written it, I can almost see the other shoe dropping, so to speak.

Never mind. The weather has been sunny, warm, and dry, my very favourite weather. It’s my happy weather. I love this weather so much I want to take it for a ride in my Chevy Camaro, park on a hill overlooking the city, slip in an eight-track of Bob Seger’s Night Moves, and get it pregnant. Then, because I sincerely do love and respect this weather, I will marry it and help raise our little weather babies, and we will grow old together, sipping our glasses of iced tea and rocking in gliders on our veranda, watching our little weather grandbabies play on the grass.

Wow. That last sentence is what happens when you enjoy a Smirnoff cooler whilst blogging.

Oh! But there is other exciting news in our house, in addition to my peculiar weather fantasies. Mark lost one of his front teeth, and the result is quite hilarious. I kind of love when kids get those awkward dental situations, a mix of giant teeth and giant gaps and teensy baby teeth. His tooth was crazily loose, and I told him about kids in my day getting their teeth pulled via the string-on-the-doorknob method. He and Jake were horrified, and asked if that had happened to me. No, I replied, I would have cried way too much. Drama queen would have been a polite way to describe the kind of kid I was. I promised Mark I wouldn’t ever try to pull his tooth, a promise I somewhat regretted when I watched him suffer through dinner. Later he actually bumped his mouth accidentally, and cried and cried as he watched the blood drip from his mouth. Just do it, we encouraged him, pull it out! And he reached in and actually pulled out his own tooth! My big big kid. I smile every time I see his giant, gappy grin.

Time to Get a Life

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Last night I stood on the soccer field in the pouring rain, watching the Green Geckos run, herd-like, after the ball and slipping and falling on the soggy, wet grass. It’s cold here, as it often is in June, and it seems to be sapping my energy and also my personality. On the “news” this morning, the weatherman mentioned that the average temperature for this time of year is 20 degrees Celsius and for some reason this enraged me beyond belief. I wondered aloud how that average was derived, because to average 20 degrees, the temperature must have at some point been above 20 degrees, and when has this occurred?

Note to self: having a heated and one-sided debate with the TV weatherman regarding his data and how he obtains his “average temperature” is neither healthy nor productive. Neither is looking up temperatures for the past ten years on the internet, stopping only when a) your data source goes only back ten years, and b) realizing that you really need to get a life.

Speaking of getting a life, Today’s Parent magazine arrived yesterday and on the cover it says “Surprising Marriage Advice: Get a Life!” It spoke to me. I haven’t actually read it yet, given that I have been busy with normal daily life and also trying to figure out where the City TV meteorologist gets his data, in a crazed way. In addition, I have been writing a piece about sex and I have had a little anxiety about it – people are going to know I have sex! Like the two kids and a twelve year monogamous relationship wasn’t a giveaway. Like I’m actually sixteen years old and trying to figure out how to hide birth control pills from my parents – is a school bag better than my sock drawer? Hoo boy. I really do need to get a life. Plus it’s going to improve my marriage, apparently. Must read the article to figure out how.

The rain has not been dampening the kids’ spirits, happily. We have been busy having a living room campout today, complete with marshmallows stuck on chopsticks and pool noodles, which they have been pretending to swim across the floor with. Very fun. Too bad this wholesome play wasn’t occurring on Monday, when a sweet yogi friend came by with her adorable three-month-old daughter. No, the boys decided they would tell our guest all about their penchant for guns, battles, and killing. Nothing says good mother like having your children talk about how they want to destroy Mickey Mouse, of all fictional characters to choose. Maybe I should go read that Today’s Parent. And also get a life.

It’s my dog’s birthday!

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I used to think that people who celebrated their pets’ birthdays were, how shall I say, a little bit lame. But! That was before we had Barkley, the wonder dog.


Mark is presenting him with his birthday treat. I tried to manually take out Barkley’s red eyes because the photo made him look like a one-headed Cerberus.


What a cute little treat for our little doggie-woggie.

So I also baked a cake. Not for the dog, obviously. The kids were adamant that birthday cake MUST be had. What kind of birthday is celebrated cakelessly? No kind of birthday, that’s what. So yesterday I baked a chocolate layer cake while the snow covered the grass and the wind blew and I wondered if all my flowers would survive or would I be making another trip to the garden center? It turns out they did survive but I was surrounded by a gloomy feeling all day, greatly exacerbated by walking the birthday boy in the blowing cold wearing my winter coat and boots on May 29.

In my twenties, I had a friend who was always sure she never wanted children and she would give her reasons for that decision at the drop of a hat, and one of those reasons was that once a person has children, they become very very boring. They talk about diapers and poop and all the non-unique things that their children do and say. This is probably true of me. I have been known to discuss diapers and poop and hey, I have a blog about my children, so I guess I am fairly dull. I do like being fairly dull, I prefer it to a more dramatic life, it seems.

One of the reasons I know I am fairly dull is that during yesterday’s snowstorm, I had a grand old time cleaning the house. My husband was out running errands, my children were very happily and peacefully (this is relative: they were playing predator and prey with dinosaurs) playing and instead of relaxing with some coffee and a book, I decided the entire house must be cleaned and all bedding must be laundered. How’s that for dramatic thrills and spills? When life gives me lemons, apparently I make lemon-scented disinfectant and scrub the kitchen cupboards. Woot! Anyone want to come over? The house smells like chocolate cake and Mr. Clean. It’s lovely.