My Perfect House

Posted on 1/11/2011 by cheesefairy

Back to the prompt book today. Describe your perfect house, it said.

We live in a nice neighbourhood, across the street from a really nice neighbourhood full of beautiful houses. I have been walking around our neighbourhood since Trombone was a baby, so almost five years. I know which houses I want, if someday, someone comes to the door and says, hey dude, just for being you we’re giving you your pick of houses.

I like houses that are symmetrical. There is a house I see all the time and it has steps up to the porch and then three feet to the right, the front door. Like, the stairs don’t end at the door. So when you’re walking by, you see stairs that end in WALL and then, oh, the door. I hate that house. SA thinks I am deranged for caring.

My ideal house will have three stories, be painted a nice colour, like blue or green (but not grass green and not a shade of green that clashes with the grass and yes, it is possible, it’s in East Vancouver) and have a big front porch. A veranda, I guess they’re called. A covered place to sit and drink tea or wine and watch people walk by.

There will be four or five bedrooms. I want a spare room for guests and an office to keep my junk in and a room for the kids to sleep in, and a room for us to sleep in and a room for SA’s computers / beer / telescopes / whatever he’s into this year.

The room that keeps my junk will be an odd shape, with corners and crevices and built-in shelves for books and knick knacks. The window will face the street and the street will be lined with big, old trees and there will always be people walking by; briskly or leisurely home from work, arm in arm for walks on warm summer evenings.

The master bedroom will have our bed in it. And a big window that overlooks the back of the house, that can be opened without fear of peepers or giant bugs.

Two bathrooms is enough. Right now we have three and that’s too many. One of the bathrooms will have a tub and the tub should be longer than six feet and deeper than four feet. The bathrooms will have windows. It’s only civilized. The summer breeze will blow the pretty curtains and freshen the room. Birds will chitter chatter, but no crows. I will ban crows.

The kitchen must be bright. I would love for it to be at the back of the house, overlooking our backyard and maybe some nature beyond it.* I adore kitchen sinks underneath big windows. It makes me more likely to wash things. Counters and a stove and a fridge and cupboards, lots of them. A full closet sized pantry would be nice. The kitchen will be big enough to have a large cooking area as well as a small seating area. Just a small table under a big picture window, where four people (or fewer) can sit and bathe in sunlight.

*in my ‘future self visioning exercise’ my future self lived in a house with the kitchen overlooking a river. It was fantastic.

Living room. I am vague on this. Big and roomy. High ceilings. Enough space that you don’t have to go back to school for a geometry degree to figure out where to put your Christmas tree. Not so much space that it echoes and is cold.

Basement with a rec room a must. I don’t care what it looks like. No, that’s not true. Carpet that is not disgusting, walls can be fake wood if necessary.

An attic or crawl space for the spiders to breed in.

I feel like I have to choose either a front or back porch but actually no, it’s my dream house. I want a back deck for grilling and lounging and entertaining people. OK, can I have a back deck AND a sun room? Because I love sun rooms. How could you not want to get out of bed and go drink coffee in your sun room?

The back yard will be grass and vegetable garden. And a big, old, thick-trunked tree. Big enough for a tree house. If the kids are too old by the time I get this house, I will hang out in the tree house myself. My friends had a tree house when I was a kid and I loved it.

The big front door will be heavy wood, with a window panel of stained glass at the top to cast rainbows along the front hall. The rain will pound against the rooftop, serious and loud and deliberate. We won’t be cushioned there, not insulated from anything but the cold. Splinters from the real wood floors will pierce our feet, the pipes will grunt, the heat will struggle to warm us. It will be hard work, it will be beautiful, it will be worth it.

What is your perfect house? Or apartment? Or VW van?

Posted in | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Notes from Mother’s Journal: Low Expectations Edition

Posted on 1/10/2011 by cheesefairy

The other day, when I was lying around feeling sick, I kept dwelling on issues with the kids. Isn’t that always the way. You have 0 energy and 0 ability to implement any changes let alone think of some but your brain focuses on some huge, stupid problem.

“My kids don’t eat well enough.” I used my last two functioning brain cells to think this thought. Seriously.

It’s true. They have fairly bland diets. They do always eat whole wheat bread with organic peanut butter but they eat it every day. Here are the vegetables they eat:

Trombone: Potatoes if they are oven fries. Ketchup.
Fresco: Potatoes if they are oven fries. Ketchup. Corn.
(They’re better with fruit. Fresco has never met a fruit he didn’t like and Trombone is a steady eddie with apples and grapes and the occasional banana or strawberry.)

Yes. I know. It’s shocking. That’s what I was thinking too. You can only let that whole “oh they’re picky toddlers” thing go so far, right? Like, not till age 15.

“OK Self,” I said, “fix this.” And then I went to sleep for another 12 hours.

When I woke up Saturday morning I felt like I had been hatched from a brand new egg. I felt awesome. AWESOME! SA, true to his weekly word, took the kids out, and I set to thinking.

“Meal plans,” I muttered, “family meals. Family eating. That’s the answer. We all eat together. We all eat the same thing.”

We eat all scattered, you see, because the kids have always gone to bed early (7:30 at the latest) and SA has always come home from work late (6:00 at the earliest). Lately – since the summer, maybe? I have been trying to get supper ready so that we can eat together, right when SA gets home, but of course the kids are trained to eat their “own” meal and they still just want to eat cereal and more cereal and oh my god could you possibly eat any more cereal than you already eat? We just bought 2kg of oat circles and I am already afraid we will run out.

Part of the problem, too, is that I tend to cook meals that are…melting pots? Stews, chilis, spaghetti sauces with vegetables, burritos, curries. Things that adults find tasty and comforting and that children (over the age of 2, this is; both my kids ate the hell out of all those foods when they were between 1 – 2) find scary because WHAT IS THAT? I can’t tell. It is twelve different colours and textures and I want cereal.

Once a week I make pizza and we are all ecstatic about it.

I had a brilliant idea.

Note: it is a brilliant idea. I have no idea if it will WORK and then be a brilliantly successful idea.

1. We will have a daily supper plan. It will involve identifiable parts: meat, starch, vegetable.
2. The kids will help with the daily supper plan
3. I will cut out pictures of food from magazines and purchase a sheet of poster board
4. We will, together, choose the foods we are going to eat and affix those foods to the poster board
5. They will help me cook. I am hoping this will also result in them not going completely batshit every night at 5 pm when I am trying to cook. Everyone says kids will more likely eat what they cook but look, here they are helping me make potato latkes the other night:

Did they like helping? Oh yes! Did they eat them? No way. (did they *try* them? yes.)

6. somethingsomethingsomethingprobablysomehairpullingsomethingsomething
7. The kids will eat balanced diets!

I bought the poster board and some of that sticky tacky stuff that you can use to put up posters. I went to the farmers market and bought vegetables and other foods. I came home to cut up magazines.

I have had a stack of magazines in my house for years. Doesn’t everyone have a stack of magazines in their house? And you think, someday I will throw these out, but not yet. Every time you read an online article about de-cluttering you find the stack and flip through the magazines and you think, yeah, these could go, but maybe I’ll make a collage of my hopes and dreams. Maybe I’ll want to read that article about the New Mrs. Trudeau again. Maybe I’ll want, oh, I don’t know, 50 pictures of FOOD SO MY KIDS WON’T DIE OF SCURVY.

So you save them.

And save them.

And then one day, you recycle them.

And three weeks later you need them.

Dammit.

So I cut up a Safeway flyer but that wasn’t really enough. And the kids, when I told them about the plan, were excited, but there is a sale on cake at Safeway this week and all they want for supper, all week, is cake.

The lovely Megan offered to mail me HER stack of magazines but a) that’s a lot of postage and b) if she mails them to me, then she will need them, like, TOMORROW and this is kind of like paying it backward, don’t you think?

I looked at brand new magazines at Costco yesterday and some of them were $7.99! For 140 chicken recipes! Sorry! Not gonna happen!

This morning after my cup of coffee I had another brainstorm. Value Village! So Fresco and I dropped Trombone and school and went to Value Village, where magazines cost $0.99 each, as god intended. I picked out a few and Fresco suddenly attached to one that had little lemon cheesecakes on the cover. And by attached I mean he carried it with him all over the store and then in the car and then wanted to take it with him for his nap but I said no. Total for 6 magazines: $6

You can’t just go to Value Village and get some magazines and leave (what? you can?) so we went to the back of the store to look at the toys and then Fresco said, “Mummy we need snowpants,” and I was going to say, “no you don’t,” when I realized that yes in fact they do, and lo! there were snowpants size 4 and lo! snowpants size 3 so I bought them. Thank you.

When we got home from school, Trombone said, as he says every day, “What did you do while I was at school?” and I resisted the urge to say, “we partied! HARD!” and told him I bought him some snowpants and he almost cried with happiness. I have no idea why. The forecast is calling for some snow tomorrow and we also have a tobogganing pass we have to use this season so we have plans to go up the mountain at some point, but really? Snowpants? Both boys tried on their snowpants and then left them on all through lunch.

And that, my friends, is why you should keep expectations nice and low for your children. Snowpants and a second-hand magazine and they won’t be bothering me for days. Bonus points: I can hear them coming. (rustle. rustle.)

But will they eat their vegetables?

Look at those faces. What do you think?

(yes, that is the magazine on Fresco’s lap. The lemon cheesecakes do look really good.)

Posted in | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Comments

Only Child – Part Two

Posted on 1/9/2011 by cheesefairy

I’ll preface by saying that there are benefits and detriments to every family configuration. And there are way more factors at play in a person’s development than just birth order. It is an entirely personal decision, how many – if any – children to have, so please don’t breed – or not – on my account. (Like you would! I know!)

Things that I appreciated about being an only child, when I was a kid:

– no hand me downs
– no enforced sharing with bratty younger siblings
– my own bedroom! Decorated just the way I wanted!

Things I should have appreciated more, when I was a kid:

– my parents’ undivided attention
– the opportunity to travel (which is also due to my dad’s superior financial planning abilities – the man is cape-worthy)
– living in a stable home, in a stable neighbourhood, with the same friends, for the length of my school career (this, so that I didn’t have to keep making new friends over and over..although that skill probably would have served me well in the long run)

Things I appreciate now:

– my independence (which, I’ve learned over the years, is best tempered with a healthy bit of dependence)
– my creativity – some of which is inherited and a lot of which developed because I had to do something with my brain when my parents were occupied and all my friends were busy
– my reluctance – actually an inability, a lot of the time – to take sides in a dispute. On my resume, this reads “diplomatic and tactful.” No, this website is not on my resume.
– my sense of responsibility (though this is also best tempered)
– my love of solitude

Contrary to popular opinion about only children, I wasn’t lonely, or spoiled, or anti-social. I had lots of friends, in part because we lived in a neighbourhood with two elementary schools, and in part because my parents made an effort to have me have lots of friends. They both came from big families that were far away, so they had to find their community and make lots of friends here, too. And as for the spoiling, I say HA. Only child meets Superhero of Financial Planning Who Wants His Mortgage Paid off Before He Turns 45 = no new shoes unless you absolutely need them. I had knock-off Barbies just like the rest of you. (but a real “Midnight” the Barbie horse, bought for me by my aunt)

I like who I am. Being an only child is part of who I am. And it’s a good conversation starter. But I still wish I had a sibling. The kind you get along with, the kind you get together with every few years and laugh way too much.

I know there are no guarantees of that kind of relationship with a sibling. I have lots of cousins, many of whom are close to my heart. And I have lots of very good friends that I only see every few years (even the ones who live in the same city!) and laugh too much with.

The thing is: at the end of this line, the train stops. When my parents are gone, it’s just me. I am the only one who will remember Halloween, 1988, when the man who was renting our basement suite dressed up like Miss Piggy, total pig drag, and he was about 6’4″ in his heels and he scared the bejeepers out of the neighbourhood children.

OK, now you guys know about it, you’ll remember too, right?

Maybe that’s why I’ve been a compulsive documenter all my life. The journal has always been my sibling. (Which explains why I want to set it on fire all the time.) And why I’m driven to friendships that matter, that will last, even through hiatuses of 2, 4, 6 years.

Maybe if I’d had a sibling I would have become a marine biologist! Or an accountant! I think I would certainly be better at math. Whew. Close call, guys.


(me and my folks on a ferryboat, circa 1975)

Posted in | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Only Child – Part One

Posted on 1/8/2011 by cheesefairy

How do you feel about your place (birth order) in your family? If you have kids, how does your own family planning reflect your upbringing?

I didn’t really like being an only child. I wanted a brother or sister. Actually I wanted a twin, but I knew this was sort of impossible. All of my friends had brothers and sisters, until I met my other only child friend in grade 5. In high school, boy crazy, I really wanted an older brother so I could flirt with his friends. My friend had an older brother and his friends were dreamy.

Well, they were stoners with mullets and jean jackets with corduroy collars, but at the time. You know.

I wanted a sibling, too, because I wanted someone to take the focus off me. My parents were always watching me. Telling me things. Making sure I was behaving myself. I accepted this to a point – it was the only way to grow up that I knew about, except from reading books and watching my friends with their siblings and parents.

I was like a little adult. I listened carefully when people talked, I waited until cookies were offered. When we went to parties, I would stay in the living room with the grown-ups until someone told me to go play in the rec room with the other kids. I did the right thing, almost all the time, and I learned to lie really well about those other times. *

When I got older, I would argue with my father but I knew he would always win. He was always right. He had the last word, on everything, no matter how insignificant. It was that control that I bucked against in my teens. It was his unflinching eye always staring at me that began to look like it was daring me, after a while. It was my birthright to put my foot down and say no, no one controls me, I am my own.

It is how they raised me; to think for myself, to be an individual, though it didn’t feel like a positive thing at the time and I’m sure “leave home at 19” wasn’t what they were expecting me to take from the life lessons they’d imparted.

Consider; my dad left his mother and sisters and moved across the ocean alone when he was in his 20s. My mom left her large family and moved across the country to start a life of her own in a city where she knew no one. It wasn’t as though I didn’t come by my rebelliousness honestly.

It is interesting to me now, to imagine what it would have been like to have a younger sibling. (I mean, obviously I can’t imagine having an older one – I’m clearly the oldest!) I don’t think my parents would have been able to control two kids in the same way they did me. They would have had to adapt their strategy. As a person who both inherited and learned some control issues, I can tell you that with one kid, I kind of had it figured out. Two adults, one small child. Golden. I mean, not all peaches and cream, but still. Raising two children has been the nail in control’s coffin. Controlling everyone, all the time, is an illusion. And it is also, unless you are far more dedicated to it than I am, an impossible way to raise children and build a family.

And for that, I am glad that I have two kids. They have forced me to figure out other ways than my dad’s ways. They teach me daily that a person can not – and should not – control another human being. Watching them figure out how to push each other’s buttons, freak out, apologize, and move on to laughter in the space of five minutes is awe-inspiring.

So incredibly loud. But awe-inspiring.

And now I am at the end of my allotted time and I didn’t get a chance to talk about what rocks about being an only child. I will have to do that tomorrow.

* For those of you who have/want only one child, I wish to clarify here that I do not think ALL only children are like this, or that YOUR only child will be like this..I had the parents I had and you are the parents you are and I am a special snowflake and etc.

Posted in | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Tea, 2009

Posted on 1/7/2011 by cheesefairy

I can’t reach my prompt book. It’s over there. And I’m over here. I got hit with some kind of virus last night and now I am lying here in my soft bed, aching, thankful that there is no more barfing.

I found this picture of tea from January 7, 2009. Two years ago today, I still kept my tea in neat piles in the cupboard closest to the floor. Fresco, then 8 months old, took it all out that day and now it’s kept in a basket on top of the cupboard closest to the ceiling.

My favourite caffienated tea is orange pekoe (has to be Red Rose. HAS TO) but I also like Earl Grey. Once I bought a double bergamot Earl Grey and it was delicious. Bergamot is what gives the Earl Grey that floral, perfumey flavour. For herbal teas I like black licorice or peppermint. There was also a nice lemon / ginger tea that I drank when I was pregnant, but I’m not so keen on it anymore.

Ah, there’s the cupboard monkey, monkeying with my cupboards.

Happy Friday, internet sugarplums. May you not barf.

Posted in | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments