Four Year Olds Actually Travel Quite Well

Posted on 8/18/2010 by cheesefairy

I don’t mean to scare everyone with children into never road tripping with those children. Your children might be fine! Your mileage may vary! Your car may be air conditioned!

The main problem with our ambitious (that’s code for stupid) (as in, ignorant because now we know better) itinerary was one thing: Fresco.

Fresco is almost 2.5 years old. Fresco likes:

– unlimited fruit
– jumping
– anything Trombone is playing with
– talking
– Laughing Cow cheese, right up till when he takes it out of the package, then he doesn’t like it anymore
– our cat
– pinching, biting and hitting when he’s mad
– threatening to pinch, bite and hit when he’s mad
– throwing things when he’s hungry
– howling like a stuck monkey when he’s the slightest bit frustrated
– popsicles
– dinosaurs
– NO NOT DINOSAURS. ONLY CATS.
– swimming
– NO NOT SWIMMING WHY WOULD YOU SAY THAT?

You see. Capricious, tempermental, short attention span, confined spaces. Which of these things just doesn’t belong.

Trombone spent hours in the car – not in a row, but totaled up – examining Where’s Waldo books. Lucky we bought 8 at Value Village before we left. When he dozed in the car, which was not often, he would often wake up cranky and crying but he would just as often wake up quiet and contemplative and say things like, “That cloud looks like a dinosaur head. And I would like some crackers, please.”

Fresco spent five minutes looking at a book and then threw it to the floor of the car and then cried because he had no book anymore and then snatched the book out of Trombone’s hand and then threw it at my head and then cried because I wouldn’t give it back and then slumped down in his seat and started howling and then started undoing his seatbelt. Oh good. We’re going 120 km/hr and you’re undoing your seatbelt.

There were three times it was good to travel with Fresco:

– while he was sleeping
– while he was watching his favourite movie, Baby McDonald, which, at 30 minutes in length, is about 400 minutes too short
– while he sang his peculiar mashups of the songs in his head. IE: Bob the builder / little star / how I wonder / can we build it / yes we can / and his bucket full of / dinosaurs!

Other than that, he acted his age. If you have ever met a 2.5 year old, you know what I mean and I am sorry, here’s a tissue. You also know that trapping one and restraining it in a moving vehicle is a dumb ass thing to do.

Fear not, in other words; if you have a Trombone-style child or your children are older than 3, your vacation should go fine. I mean, it won’t be much like a vacation in the sense that you are taking your work with you, but neither will you find yourself considering duct tape for purposes not on the label. Probably.

Here, random dinosaur picture!

Posted in | Tagged , , , , , , | 8 Comments

And You Should See the Bugs on the Car’s Front Grill

Posted on 8/16/2010 by cheesefairy

Today we went to Queen’s Park, as you do when you have small children and it is eleventy million degrees hot outside. The trees make it cool and then of course there is the water park. Nutritious AND refreshing to toddlers the world over. Of course, there is also a treat stand.

“Mommy!” said Trombone, “Look, the ICE CREAM is open!”
“Oh I would like some ice cream,” said Fresco.
“No, no ice cream today,” I said.
They wept bitterly.
“But why?” Trombone wailed, “we had lots of ice cream on our vacation!”
“I want our vacation!” said Fresco.

It is strange to be back, to have been gone so long, to have had such a different experience than I expected. It was not all bad or all good; it was 40% bad and 50% good and 10% ice cream.

***

While knowing that one cannot plan something one has never done before, I still planned a lot. I booked campsites in advance (that I later canceled) and I packed garlic (that we never used) and I took extra trinket bags so I could put together more trinket bags for the drive home (HA HA HA – here, kids, fetch this pamphlet from the visitor centre and like it).

I could not plan, re: camping:

– the kids have no idea how to sleep in a tent. All they wanted to do was run around it, head butt each other and escape.
– the sun doesn’t set till 10 but it rises at 5. That is not enough sleep for anyone.
– there are no black tents to block out the sun. Dastardly sun.

We did our first two nights of camping (Sweaty and Buggy as I have affectionately named them) in BC and Alberta and then spent a night in Kindersley, SK, home of the place that has the thing with the – I don’t know. I don’t know anything about Kindersley except the Wal-Mart parking lot was the size of North Burnaby and the Humpty’s restaurant thoroughly charmed our children. Mostly because they have only been in one other restaurant, ever, and it was Denny’s.

The fourth night we spent in Saskatoon, at the home of Sarah, Michael, Rowan (6), Lilah (4.5), Audra (1 week now, but was at the time still fetal), Pat-The-Mum (age undisclosed) and Terry (ditto). They have a beautiful house that includes air conditioning.

We put our boys in the bedroom with their girls, hoping they’d just, you know, go to sleep. It went like this:

Fresco: WHERE IS MY MOMMY!
Lilah, age 4.5, who enjoys any excuse to not sleep: Mummy, he wants his mommy!
Trombone (crying): Everyone is crying!
Rowan, age 6, who could sleep through a nuclear war: I am trying to sleep. It is too loud.
Sarah, very pregnant: I wish I could drink.
Me: I am drinking!
Michael: Me too!
SA: Me too!
Fresco: WHERE IS MY MOMMY!

The boys slept in the living room, the girls slept in their room, I slept under a piano with my head wedged up my own ass, because Trombone is a mat-hog, and we all woke up overjoyed and looking for coffee, which was thankfully in good supply.

Then SA and the kids drove on to Regina where they stayed at a Holiday Inn Express that featured a BACON BUFFET – damnit! – while I stayed in Saskatoon for a couple of days, without my own kids and talking to grown ups. OK, I guess that’s worth trading for the bacon buffet.

And! I got to take a Greyhound bus across Saskatchewan and Manitoba, all by myself. The Greyhound bus was awesome. I could nap, read, write, snack, look out the window, all without explaining myself to anyone or sharing my snacks. I ate a very good BLT in Dauphin, Manitoba.

We spent a week in Brandon, seeing the sights and eating our weights in treats from (Aunt) Anna’s Indulgence Dessert Bar in The Town Centre Mall, get your ass there and eat some desserts, people. Your ass isn’t going to grow all by itself, you know.

Then we left for home, with a revised itinerary to account for the facts we had gleaned from our trip there, namely:

– we could not drive more than 450 kms per day without dire consequences (ie: trinkets from former trinket bags tossed at driver’s head by unruly 2.5 year old)
– it was pissing rain and stormy in our second and third nights’ planned accommodation (Dinosaur Provincial Park)
– we had already tossed our first tent due to creeping mould due to improper storage after the thunderstorm on our second night of camping (top tip: AIR OUT YOUR WET TENT BEFORE STORING IN HOT TRUNK FOR ONE WEEK [IDIOTS])
– we were not especially interested in proving how hardcore we were after 2 weeks on the road with children who were by then
– – well out of their routine and nowhere near anything resembling civilized
– – completely uninterested in playing “I Spy,” “count the cows” or “name the wheat field” (cretins!)
– – growing rapidly uninterested in our meagre collection of DVDs, aiieeee! When the DVDs run out, we are SCREWED!

…so instead of insisting on camping and making a hard trip even harder, we returned our replacement (as yet unused) tent for a full refund and did The Armpit Motel Tour of Western Canada: Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat, Drumheller, Canmore and Enderby.

Things to remember about long car trips with children under 5:

1. Don’t do it.

2. Camping is good, but motels have clock radios and the children will be just as excited about the clock radios. Mostly, what they are excited about is getting out of the hot car, so make that happen as soon as possible, toss in a pool and you’re golden.

3. Kids love routine. We had no routine. The routine we tried building for them was wrong, terrible and wholeheartedly rejected. Without routine, they start to unravel. They weep, trip, pinch and bite. They cling, whine, scowl. We start to want to leave them by the side of the road with their Where’s Waldo books for shade.

3 a. Riding for hours in a car every day does not count as a routine.

4. The kids will love chicken fingers the first time they eat them. They will be transfixed by the chicken fingers. The restaurant was making them crazy with love. The second time? Maybe they eat half the plate and then start angling for dessert. The third time? They are done with restaurants, chicken fingers and YOU.

Chicken fingers = heroin? Maybe.

Seriously, by the time we ordered our final meal of chicken fingers in a restaurant (that would be Saturday, in Merritt, OH MY GOD Bonus Tip: never go to Merritt if you can help it) the kids were like, yeah, whatever, chicken fingers, here, I’m sucking ketchup out of the container, that’s how much I care about chicken fingers.

And you, the parent? You the parent are saying, I give up, suck the ketchup if you must, as long as you just SHUT IT for five minutes so I can enjoy my sub-par pasta dish and the Lager that the waitress brought me when I asked for a dark beer.

You want salt in your hand from the salt shaker? OK. Here’s salt in your hand from the salt shaker.

5. This is not ideal. This is Wartime Parenting. You can sort out the rules and worry about the bad habits when you get home.

We had some fun. We saw dinosaurs (Drumheller) and a giant turtle statue (Boissevain, MB) and real frogs (International Peace Gardens) and we saw family and friends and ate delicious food and my father in law fed me copious amounts of gin and we swam in lots of pools and played in lots of playgrounds including one in Zealandia, SK that had equipment from the ’80s and the boys were enraptured by Guitar Hero and their Uncle playing it LIKE A ROCK STAR and despite the Very Hungry Mosquitoes, I don’t appear to have contracted West Nile Virus – so far – and we went 5,000 kilometres without a flat tire (although we did run over a small, blue cooler on our first day of driving and we thought that was the end right there) (and we also got snarled in traffic 30 minutes from home because of a highway-side brushfire [dispose of your cigarettes, people!]) or calling each other names (much) and we took 500 pictures and several videos and laughed some, at least a little every day, even if some of it was tinged with hysteria.

***

All day on Saturday, on our way home from Enderby, Fresco would cry,
“I want to go to our new motel!”
and Trombone, ever the helpful big brother, would say,
“We’re not going to a motel! We’re going home!”
and Fresco would cry and wail louder.
“But I want to go to our pool!”

I guess that’s an endorsement?

My recommendation: wait till the kids are older. But really, you could do a lot worse than we did. And there is always ice cream.

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

Gone Fishing

Posted on 7/26/2010 by cheesefairy

Fishing with tent poles.

PS: I went back for The Shoes and when I tried them on again, the right foot was bigger than the left.

1. WTF? Isn’t that, like, totally backwards? It is for me anyway.
2. Because of the too-loose fit, they were not so comfortable.

Not to be swayed, I went out into the mall and found other Keen sandals on sale – though not as deep a discount – and in my size and both feet fit equally well. Preliminary research indicates they fall somewhere in the low to mid-shock category so I’m keeping them. If you see sparking along Highway 1, that’s me. Or Saint Aardvark’s brain short circuiting from the noise emanating from the back seat of the car.

Posted in | Tagged | Comments Off on Gone Fishing

Shock!

Posted on 7/22/2010 by cheesefairy

You may have been writing about your life too long if you go to write about some aspect of your personality and think: but have I written this before? and then spend 20 minutes going through your own archives looking for a post about that aspect of your personality but finding nothing.

Have I told you about the shock thing?

I have a shock thing. When I get a shock – through overenthusiastic static, generally – I grimace and shout “motherfucker.” I can’t help it. Now, these days I have to shout “motherfucker” into my shoulder or purse or whatever is handy because I live with Laurel and Hardy but I still cannot stop myself. I am very sensitive to electricity. That thing where you shuffle your feet over the carpet and then pat me on the shoulder and go ha ha ha? I will kill you.

Playgrounds! Geezus. Plastic slides slid down by children with plastic shoes! And what if they fall at the end and they want a hug? “NO HUGGING MOMMY! I AM COMFORTING YOU VERBALLY FROM A DISTANCE!”

Driving! Wrong-soled shoes on the pedals and then the floor mat of the car and then I get out onto the floor of the underground parking and the floor is treated with some weird rubber coating stuff and I go to lock my car door and ZAP. Motherfucker.

So when I buy shoes, if the shoes do not conduct electricity through their soles, I will wear those shoes all the time. I am less fussy about this than I used to be, because I used to work in an office and that’s a lot of ‘motherfucker’ in an otherwise quiet and relatively polite environment. These days I am mostly outside. But still, this is one of those things that makes it even harder to find The Perfect Shoes.

Shoes that Shock Me:

My running shoes. Only to be worn if not driving, and not going into any stores or the library.
My flip flop crocs. Water park only. NO DRIVING IN CROCS.

Shoes that Sometimes Shock Me:

The cute plaid sneakers. Walking to the park only. Probably best not to drive in the cute sneakers.

Shoes that Do Not Shock Me:

My rubber boots.
My winter boots.
My favourite sandals, 2 years old, by Naot.
Dress shoes, generally, but I don’t get out much.

As it is summer, I am wearing the sandals every day. As a bonus, they are the most comfortable shoes on the planet and I can walk for miles x The Who and not get blisters or sore knees or bunions or anything. (yes I know bunions are not applicable in this case but I like saying bunions.)

However. This is what happened a few weeks ago and again this past weekend: I went to Superstore. I was pushing a cart around Superstore. I love Superstore! But on these two occasions, every once in a while I would be turning a corner or stopping to look at the sale cookies and ZAP.

From the floor (did they repaint it with electricity?) through my perfect sandals (is the rubber wearing out?) ZAP into my hands on the handle of the cart. ZAP. This has never happened to me before. It was most terrible.

Superstore, it made me not want to spend too much more time in your store. Ever. It made me want to leave the cart in the toilet paper isle and run for the door. And, most importantly, it made my ordinarily lovely solo shopping trip to Superstore into a battle of epic proportions, Good Vs. Evil! complete with a lot of swearing. I might have bought the wrong kind of noodles, I was so distracted by the random ZAPpery.

You know there is a wrong kind of noodles, right?

Today I took the children to Metrotown. Hey, they wanted to go to Metrotown, they were specific. I needed to get Fresco a pair of shoes – but that’s another story. We found some at Winners and then I took a peek in the size 11 isle for me and wow – a pair of Keens sandals in size 11. I have looked in vain for size 11 Keens before. And they were only $50, half their usual price. I tried them on and they fit.

Incidentally, if you are a real sucker for punishment, I recommend taking two children under the age of 10 to a store where the shoes are on shelves from the floor to the ceiling.

Anyway, the Keens. They are made of squishy, rubber-like material. They make me nervous, shock-wise, so I left them there.

But I can’t stop thinking about them. I could wear them in lakes and rivers. And even though I don’t have a paying job, I still believe in “if the shoe fits and is half price, it’s a miracle and the unicorns would want you to buy the damn shoe.”

But what if they make me shout motherfucker all the time? I will have to wear them while driving.

Should I buy them and shuffle my feet all over the mall before I take the price tag off?

Should I just get my Naots resoled?

Should I train myself to say ‘unicorns’ instead of ‘motherfucker’?

What do you guys think?

(Oh and the reason I have the shock thing, I think, is because in grade 3 I plugged in the film projector and got electrocuted. Just enough to make me Magical, not enough to actually fry anything. I’m pretty sure. Although I do have a little freckle where the burn occurred.)

(Did you know I was Magical? It’s true.)

Posted in | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

Controversunday: That New York Times Article

Posted on 7/19/2010 by cheesefairy

I have a love/hate thing with parenting articles. On the one hand, I think they’re often more divisive than informative. They imply that someone is doing it RIGHT and the other guys are doing it WRONG.

On the other hand, I also watch America’s Next Top Model from time to time. So I read it, this article in the New York Times about how Parents Hate Parenting and then I read a bazillion blog posts about the article and then it was Controversunday, which is a Sunday meme where people can write about the same topic and IT was about the article so I thought I’d run my mouth off a bit.

Look, it’s a badge. It came from here and the hostess of Controversunday is Our Lady of Perpetual Breadcrumbs and I first discovered this meme through A moment to think and is that it? Am I done crediting people? I don’t know what I”m doing here. Halp!

badges

The New York Times Article talks to a bunch of people about their experiences parenting, reporting that parenting is not as rosy and glowy as we would believe. It sounded to me like she was saying, “What are we doing wrong, that we’re not enjoying this wonderful experience?”

Which left me wondering – Who said it was a wonderful experience? Like, a wholesale, wonderful experience without warts? I don’t expect to completely enjoy any experience, let alone something as complicated as creating, bearing, and raising another human being.

We struggle, in our house, with our happiness. Because often, the children get in the way of what we want. What we want:

1. quiet
2. time

Every time we practice expressing our disappointment, getting over it, having a good day anyway, we grow. We become better versions of ourselves. We become more patient, more kind, more knowledgeable. Every day we survive as parents makes us better people. Not better people than you. Better people than we were yesterday.

Parenthood isn’t about happiness from chocolate cake. It’s about happiness from personal growth.

The article makes it sound like there are people who decide to have a child based on whether they think that a child would…bring them this happiness? Like the waiter brings you your food? Naturally, those people are disappointed when the child brings chaos instead.

(That’s not what I ordered! Should I have had the Harvey Wallbanger instead of the Sidecar? Would I be happier?)

The thing about any external change to a situation is: it’s external. It can neither bring, nor deny you happiness. If you were happy before, you will strive for happiness despite the change.* If you were unhappy before, you will continue to be unhappy, despite the change. Much as a Big Frouffy Wedding! will not change the fact that you don’t love your partner, a Big Beautiful Baby! will not change the fact that you don’t like your life.

* with an exception made for post partum depression and other mental illnesses

Children are not a mirror. They are a magnifying glass. They make everything bigger; louder, messier, funnier, weirder, more stressful, more exciting. And so, they bring your issues into sharp relief. They make you face your shit.

Is that going to make you happier?
Is it going to make you happier, right now, to know that you have some shit you’ve not been facing?
Is it going to make you happier, right now, to look at that shit, up close and very large?

No, no, and no.

But when you’ve dealt with, faced, and moved on from your shit, you will be happier. You will understand your anger or your fear or your pain, at the root, you will have looked at these demons, at their teeth and claws and warts and you will know you have met them where they live. You will be happier for having done the work, whether or not you are a parent.

I am still doing this work. Every day. That is what sucks about parenting. It’s work. (and it’s every day) But it’s work that, if you do it right, makes you a better person. That’s what I want from my life; it might not be what everyone else in the world wants. So I would say yes, I am happy to be a parent and I am happy to work at parenting every day, and I am happy I got the kids I got, but being their parent doesn’t make me happy.

Being me makes me happy. My kids have their own jobs to do.

Posted in | Tagged , , | 19 Comments