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Ma’am, I’m Sorry. It’s A Bad Case of Harley Crotch.

2/22/2010 in | 11 comments

Yesterday it finally happened: I became a real parent.

I have seen it mentioned many times that one is not truly a parent until one has been vomited upon and been to the emergency room. I have disregarded this cliche for the past almost-four years but obviously did not dodge it completely because it was still there in a dark corner of my head as I pulled the vomity shirt over my head and prepared to call the nurseline for advice.

But this is not the post I want to write. It is a boring story with not much humour in it; yesterday Fresco spent the day with a sudden, bad cough and trouble breathing, he ended the evening with a hysterical crying/coughing fit and then blew chunks all over me. I put him to bed and he went to sleep and then I called the nurseline. The nurseline nurse said, with that slow, cautious tone, “I am a little worried about him actually” which, in my experience, is unlike a nurseline nurse, so I took him out of bed and we went to the local ER and were there for 3 hours and he doesn’t have an infection or asthma, but I’m glad I went because I wouldn’t have slept if we’d stayed home either, The End.

Oh, also; chest x-rays on children (& possibly adults?) are fairly terrifying, in a “Brazil” (the movie) kind of way.

The post I wanted to write? I was thinking about one about Fresco turning 22 months old, which means he is 2 months short of his second birthday and older now than Trombone was when he became an older brother. I had also been thinking about older brother / younger brother dynamics. I am toying with the idea of giving up dairy again – excellent blog-fodder and also, relevant to the blog’s title – but I’ve already blown that for today because all there was to eat in the fridge was leftover lasagna and what was I going to do, ignore it? Then there was the post about writing and how hard it is to work the fiction muscles after so long working the non-fiction muscles. (think: those guys who have the big upper bodies but tiny little thighs and look like cartoon characters when they walk.)

(Or, for that matter, the guy I saw at the Safeway parking lot the other day who walked like he’d been riding a motorcycle for about 15 years straight, which waddling “I just peed my pants” look I have dubbed “Harley Crotch” unless someone else has already come up with that one. “Harley Crotch” isn’t contagious but it is conducive to slow-growing fungi, etc. It is possible that only someone who has lived in downtown Vancouver and/or hates motorcycles will find this amusing.)

Because of the events of yesterday and last night, though, I have only had 6 hours of sleep, which, it turns out, is not enough anymore; I enjoy my nightly 8ish hours thankyouverymuch and I have a similar cough to Fresco’s but I don’t intend to vomit – and at least now we have an inhaler in the house in case my own airways become constricted. I can hear Trombone in his room engaging in some raucous pretend play to rid himself of sick-younger-brother frustration; something about a wagon going over a cliff and a young boy landing ass over teakettle (not his words) in the prickly bushes, which means he is not napping, though he could surely use it, and which also means that I only have until 2:30 to do whatever I need to do without the company of at least one child.

So this will have to do.

In sum: I am tired. And grateful for our health care system and for coffee and for another sunshiney day that meant I could sit without my jacket on and drink coffee while the children dug in the woodchip playground, the faint cacophony of “Mine! MINE! MINE!” enveloped by the mist of my reverie.

Also, I would like to share this picture of Morgan Freeman, which is what I keep coming back to for another dose of strength until later today when I can eat an inhuman portion of oven fries and go to bed.

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In Between

2/5/2010 in | 6 comments

Between twitter’s 140 characters and a blog post’s unlimited characters, there lies recording a thought for the sake of it, jotting down a paragraph even if you know you can’t afford time for a page. When I restarted the morning pages process (3 pages of freehand every morning before doing anything else) back at the end of December I only did the full 3 pages two days in a row. Since then it’s been one page here, a paragraph two days later, two pages a week after that. I would like to make a note of my existence every day, be it a sentence, a word, a fragment. Not everything has to be genius, fleshed out, conceived of, rehashed. Some things can be dashed off between putting the children to bed and putting myself to bed, or even putting the children to bed and stuffing my face with a burger and fries from Burger Heaven that SA is currently fetching, whattaman.

My twitterfriend Jandi decided she needed to blog every day. We are recent acquaintances so I do not think she was challenging me to a duel but regardless I think I will try it too. Without expecting perfection.

This afternoon in the park, we tossed little rubber “superballs” up the steep path and then tried to catch them on the way down. One ball was lost. The squirrel who finds it will hopefully take some delight in its rainbow colours and perfect sphere. Before trying to eat it.

We passed the Queen’s Park Preschool on our way out of the park and I was startled to see a woman sitting in a lawn chair, wearing a parka, hood up, doing some kind of craft. It was almost 5 pm, well past school pickup time. Was she a security guard? Were the coyotes breaking in to the preschool after hours to steal glue? I suddenly realized: she was camping out for preschool registration, which starts tomorrow at 8 am. She is first in line. I feel sick thinking about it. I mean, I talked to some people last summer who spent the night in line (yes, in New Westminster, BC, Canada, for a PRESCHOOL spot) and said it was an awesome bonding experience but I still think it’s twisted. And even though it is a beautiful school, situated in the park and right across the street from our house, I will be damned if I go anywhere near it, even if someone comes to my house and hands me a preschool spot for Fresco. Yur elitism: we do not want it.

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Psst

1/21/2010 in | No comments

I have a post up at the chock-full-of-awesome local blog, Tenth To the Fraser.

- Includes adorable photo of Trombone and Fresco.
- No Wiggles content at all.

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Analogies a Specialty of the House

11/19/2009 in | 12 comments

This is my 1,707th post. It has taken me six years to write 1,707 posts.

I have tweeted (on twitter) 1,712 times. It has taken me less than a year to write that many tweets. 1,712 times 120 characters (140 characters allowed per tweet, but I am averaging) is 205,440 words.

205,440 words! About nothing! I am running in a hamster wheel of Seinfeld episodes!

I joined twitter when I signed up to be a Canada Moms Blog Blogger. I had a bunch of instant friends; the CMB team, the other writers who belonged to the greater network of the Silicon Valley Moms Blog. I followed them all. They all followed me. After a few months maintaining two blogs, a facebook page and a twitter feed, I realized there was too much of me out there. Too many places where I was smiling, standing at the chip bowl, making pleasantries. I was in all different corners of the room during the party and that is not my style.

There is nothing wrong with that person. I am just not her.

The Internet has grown around me like a very aggressive garden. Lately I feel like I’m constantly weeding, trimming back over-zealous vines, bush-whacking with a sharp knife that I might see the good again, the small wild flowers trying to find the light, the ivy softening cold stone walls.

Twitter is a constant battery of starlings in this garden. Protecting their nests, dive bombing when I walk by, and chattering, the constant chattering. I have no use for it.

Ah, that’s not even it, which is too bad because I like the starling imagery a lot. It’s not that twitter (or those who use it) bothers me. Some judicious following / unfollowing and you, too, can see only what you want to see on twitter (or anywhere else on the ‘net.) It’s how I use twitter that bothers me. It’s that I throw these one-offs, these 140 character pieces out into the ether and never see them again. I never dig out the story and I love the story. The story is the thing.

Of course, I could do that. It’s not twitter’s fault that I don’t. I guess it comes from being a different kind of processor. An internal processor.

Let’s put this in the language of reality TV. At the beginning of the day I have 5 bags of chips to give out. One goes to the kids. One goes to SA. One goes to me. One goes to the house / to writing / to slack-jawed drooling in front of the TV. And one goes to the Internet. Will it be twitter who gets the bag of chips? This blog? Someone else’s blog comments?

Blogging replaced real writing for me because it provided instant gratification. I hate to admit it, but it is obvious. I could work for months on a short story, send it to magazines for months more, hear nothing, start over, spend years. People do. Better people than me. Maybe if I had kept doing that for the past six years instead of blogging I would be published by now.

Sobering thought.

As if blogging wasn’t instant gratification enough, tweeting comes along, with gratification even more instant and for far less effort.

In a perfect world, if I were better organized and disciplined then yes, I could have it all. I could use twitter to my advantage. But right now, twitter is using me. It takes my bag of chips and then I have no bag of chips left for any other part of the Internet. The Internet is hungry!

First step. Losing twitter, at least for a while. Maybe someday, if I have twelve bags of chips a day, I can take it back.

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Go: Everybody!

11/5/2009 in | 15 comments

It’s November. Did you know that? I only know because the calendar features largely in our day; Trombone is always asking what day it is, what month it is, is it time to go Trick or Treating again, is it time to change the monkey yet?

Our wall calendar is a sock monkey calendar, you see. So every month there is a different monkey.

I kind of like: “Is it time for a new monkey?” as a random question that you might hear around our house. Not that we don’t have plenty of random questions for the overhearing.

Anyway, it’s November which means:

- Mister Dymund’s birthday
- Tom Waits in my head for a whole month
- The tree outside my living room window sheds its leaves.

and also for those of creative persuasions:

- National Novel Writing Month
- National Blog Posting Month

Oh it’s official all right. Don’t you scorn it.

All these people whose writing I love who rarely post are now posting every day and like a greedy, greedy piggo, I am lapping it all up.

  • NoPantsIsland is writing a November novel and working on some other writing and posting the contents of her fascinating head every day.
  • Monkeypants is working something like 17 jobs and taking transit and posting her hilarious and beautiful observations every day.
  • GeckoBloggle is growing a moustache and cycling really far and raising children and going to work and posting the best stream-of-how’s-yer-computer-doing-I-love-stuff-and-hate-other-stuff every day.
  • Elswhere is working for a more literate society and raising her circus girl and has a cold right now but is still posting her very funny and often poignant thoughts every day.
  • Schmutzie, who is hardly a slouch in the posting department anyway, is posting every day, writing a novel, running grace in small things, not smoking, writing at Mamapop, participating in Mondo Beyondo and for all I know fixing old motorcycles in her spare time.
  • And of course my own Saint Aardvark has posted every day he’s been away, which is nice because talking on the phone is not for us and also he is a fantastic, vastly under-appreciated writer. Living under my shadow as he does (TIC) (that’s for tongue-in-cheek, I’m coining it). He will probably stop posting every day when he gets home because the children will require his attention, so enjoy him while you can.

You people are amazing. Go on with your bad selves.

(What amazing thing are you doing? It can be anything. I would love to cheer you on. Leave a comment & let us know!)

This post brought to you by the cup of coffee I have consumed while the children continue sleeping well past their usual wake up time of 5:45 am. Coffee and morning solitude? I haz not had since 2005, I’m pretty sure.

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