What We Don’t Inherit, We Get in the Mail

Posted on 12/5/2008 by cheesefairy

I read a piece in the Globe and Mail yesterday about in-laws. Apparently those old saws about mothers-in-law have been investigated and the findings are in; mothers are engineered to compete with their (sons’ female) mates. Whether or not this is true is not applicable to me because I have outstanding, incredible in-laws and so does Saint Aardvark. I realize I am very lucky because I do know a lot of people for whom “in-law” is synonymous with “person I want to poke. hard. with hot pokers.” But in our family we understand each other pretty well. Some of us, like SA and my dad, understand each other a little too well, but I try to be grateful rather than freaked out and then I enjoy all the booze they make in their respective homemade stills and it doesn’t matter anymore.

Last week we got a parcel from SA’s parents. It contained a Winnie the Pooh bed sheet and a number of books for Trombone. There was one small book for Fresco too but he ate half of it while I was looking at the bed sheet so he will get it back when he is 17 and no longer eating everything. We get these care packages pretty frequently; SA’s mom is the unofficial queen of Value Village and what she doesn’t sell for killer profit on e-bay she sends our way. But the best part of this package was the gift for me. A zippered bag filled with Taco Bell Fire Sauce.

I have written before (in 2003? feels like only yesterday!) about how annoying it is that Canada has precious few Taco Bells and how the TBs there are only sell Mild and Hot sauce, as though we can’t HANDLE THE FIRE, which is totally not true, just look at our Prime Minister –

(Lame Canadian politics joke. As you were.)

Anyway, I have been going on about it for a number of years now so unsurprisingly I am well known in the family for loving Taco Bell’s Fire Sauce. So much so that when SA’s aunt and uncle recently drove up to visit his parents, they went through America and ripped off a Taco Bell of its entire Fire Sauce supply and then it got mailed to me.

Everyone should have extended family like this.

Yesterday I made play dough. I highly recommend this activity because 1. you get to find the cream of tartar at the supermarket, which is kind of an adventure! (unless I am the only one who doesn’t keep cream of tartar in her house?) and 2. your toddler might really like it (the play dough, not the cream of tartar) and keep himself busy with cookie cutters while you try not to pass out from the killer head cold he gave you. (Also, 3. he might beat the play dough instead of his younger brother. Your mileage may vary. Mine certainly does.) When I was a kid, my mom worked as a preschool teacher so I have a lot of memories of play dough being made at our house. As I kneaded and kneaded and kneaded and added food colouring and kneaded, I felt, for the first time, like someone might look in my window and mistake me for a real mother. Not a dishevelled nanny or a deeply troubled auntie, but a real, honest to goodness, mother.

All those connections over history, advice and experience passed from woman to woman and what it takes is play dough. Funny old world.

(I used this recipe for Nature’s Playdough (only with real, poisonous food colouring instead of vegetable colouring) in part because it called for an ingredient I did not have and we needed a walk and a walk with a goal is a walk worth taking!)

Posted in food, the parenthood | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

More Tigger! Less Eeyore!

Posted on 12/2/2008 by cheesefairy

I was nursing the baby and thinking about months. I’ve heard a lot of talk about how November is a terrible month but I have always loved November. Even this past November. I did love it. It was fine. The days have been dark but I am cooking more soup. It was no better and no worse than October. I think it is only the months from which you expect Great Things, like JUNE or MAY or FEBRUARY where there is the potential to disappoint.

Of course that would be different from person to person. Those are the first months that sprang to mind for me so apparently those are my hooray months. If bad things were to happen during those months I would be surprised and disappointed.

I like February because my birthday is in it. But I have a friend who hates February because it’s the last month of winter in the midwest US and the last month of winter apparently can just about kill you with its incessant piles of snow and hundreds of degrees below freezing. I don’t take it personally. Every year she sends me an email; I know your birthday is in February and I like you a lot but DAMN I hate this month.

What month do I hate? January. My mother’s birthday is in January. And a few other people that I love. But damn I hate January.

Because: if you start counting from November, January is the third month of winter – whatever that means in your part of the world. Here it usually means freak snowfalls that no one shovels because the stores are all out of shovels because it never snows in Vancouver. And then more rain. And then slush. It’s still dark. It’s 31 days long. After a string of extra days off, Christmas / other holiday excitement, the novelty of a new calendar year: suddenly it’s just. January.

There are no holidays in January (in Canada). It’s Back to Business. Back to School. Stop your slacking. Make some resolutions. Be better than you were last year, last month. It’s like a whole month of Mondays. God.

I hate Mondays. Even now that I don’t have to stand around a water cooler and go on about what I did all weekend, I still hate Mondays. Mostly because the children get used to having enough attention after a weekend with 2 adults : 2 kids and then on Monday they are clambering over me like competing clans of monkeys more more more and neither will take no for an answer.

Also, half the businesses in the Mizzle are closed on Mondays. Not that this really affects me but I mention it as one more strike against.

I am anticipating January 2009 being something like a month of Mondays. Having had SA home a lot in December, come January I will be undoubtedly looping the following recorded announcement, “No, Christmas is over, there are no more gingerbread cookies, not till next year, (yes, I know I can make gingerbread all year round, thanks) Santa is gone, that’s it for presents, now would you go play with them and let mommy lie on the floor in peace.”

Or maybe not. Is January anyone’s favourite month? If so, why? Do you all even have favourite months? Am I crazy?

Posted in , more about me!, new westminster, two! children!, whiny | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Oh, RIGHT! Or: November is Almost Over

Posted on 11/29/2008 by cheesefairy

It occurs to me that the last thing I said about the novel I was writing was that I was going to keep writing it. A few days later, I stopped.

I reached 15,000-odd words. I was really chugging along. I had developed some plot and the characters were having good conversations and there was even a tie-in to my upcoming massage appointments, so I could justify them further by calling them research. But all it takes is a couple of bad days and then you do the little calculation, let’s see, 14 days left in November, divided by 35,000 words, wow, and I write about 1,500 words per hour but for days at a time there is no naptime longer than 45 minutes and yes, there are evenings, but I am only conscious for an hour after the kids are in bed and I like to use that hour to communicate important information to Saint Aardvark.

After I had the awesome massage last Saturday I decided I would spend any free time focusing on my body and let my mind fester a little longer. I officially gave up on the novel last weekend, after a full week not writing but thinking I might get back to it any minute. It’s not even a justification or an excuse this time, I really think my body needs my attention. I am slouchy and sore, achy and twisted. I have been paying attention, over the past week, to how I sit and stand. I usually sit with my lower body facing one way and my upper facing another. Then I turn my head. Unsurprisingly, it hurts.

Do you know how hard it is to relax your neck? Excellent Masseuse told me to take a minute to think, “My neck and shoulders are relaxed” every night before going to sleep. I try, but I can’t tell if my neck is relaxing or not. I have to tense it up and then relax it in order to feel any different.

In the novel I was writing, the main character, a gay man named Terry, inherits the coffee shop where he works when his boss, who had no other friends, dies suddenly of a heart attack. Terry decides to turn the coffee shop into a wellness centre and goes to a seminar for New Age Entrepreneurs, where, amidst the organic granola bars and soy smoothies he meets a yoga teacher about to open his own studio, a very tall man named Umberto. They fall in love and I am sure they will live happily ever after even if I don’t write their story.

I feel good about letting it go. Since I wrote the last words, over 2 weeks ago, I have hardly given it a passing thought except to be relieved that I don’t have to feel guilty about lying on the floor for half an hour instead of writing. I have precious little time to myself and I am simply not willing to give it up for anything right now. My resistance to the idea of disciplining myself to spend every free moment of my day creating an alternate universe leads me to believe that the peace and quiet I am sometimes lucky enough to enjoy during the middle of my day is alternate universe enough for the time being.

Posted in two! children!, writing | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Meanwhile…

Posted on 11/26/2008 by cheesefairy

Hey good news! Everyone who commented on my last post gets a prize! ONE FULL DAY with Fresco!

I figure after 2 weeks I will want him in my house again.

Can’t think of a new way to phrase this. That baby is LOUD. Previously it was kind of endearing. Shows character. Makes him *him*. Last week, the day after his vaccinations, he spent the day being clingy and whiny and when he gets clingy and whiny, he shouts. Shouts if you put him down, shouts if he can’t see you anymore, shouts if he wants a toy and can’t get the toy. I am not used to this. Trombone would cry. I figured he was normal – I have heard that babies cry. The experiment is not a fair one; when was at home with Trombone crying, there was no one simultaneously saying, “Can I have a treat? Can I have a treat? Can I have a treat NOW? Can I have an Aero bar?” (thank you, Halloween.) So it was stressful, the crying, but at least I was only accountable to me and the infant. And I don’t remember Trombone being so fretful all day long like this.

Also, Trombone slept through the night at an early age. This baby still wakes up twice a night. I am plenty tired and short-tempered on a good day and then, THEN I spend the day being shouted at? And it’s not a “hey, could I get some service?” sort of shout. It’s a “HEY BITCH, WHERE MY FUN AT?” sort of shout. It is imperious and it echoes and it makes everyone around it cringe. Yes, I have that shouting baby at the grocery store. A million apologies.

So he did it this past Thursday. All day. But Friday – Sunday it was all sunshine and rainbows again so I figured Thursday was due to the vaccinations. Then Monday. Shouting. Tuesday. Shouting. This morning, I woke to the sound of shouting. I felt like a big piece of glass about to shatter into a million pieces. I couldn’t talk, couldn’t smile, couldn’t do anything but hold the baby, jam the soother in his mouth, keep him from shouting.

Who gets up at 5 am just to shout? It’s not civilized.

Possible causes of Shoutapalooza include: teething. Can’t quite crawl. Bored. Tummyache from apricots. Diaper rash.

The shouting makes me tense. It makes Trombone tense. It makes me more tense with Trombone and vice versa. Everything is aggressive and in-your-face and like we are living at CNN on the first day of a new war. One day was rough. Three has nearly killed me. I am hopeful there will not be four.

We walked to the Most Depressing Mall in the Universe this morning. It is getting decked for Christmas, which means a Santa’s village and a bunch of mid-mall vending tables. Mostly the vendors are for hand-sewn dishrags and quilt raffles but there was one for Dead Sea Skin Products. I felt bad for them. There was a big, exciting booth and several hotties of both sexes, waiting to accost passers-by with “Would you like a sample of our new skin regime?” but the only passers-by, of course, are very old people, very poor people in from the cold and very addled, rather rude people like me.

I was sitting on a bench, eating my Bacon N Egger while Trombone ate his ham and cheese croissant (we compromised on a “healthy” treat; hey it’s better than an Aero bar) and Fresco looked at the lights. A middle aged guy, tall and gangly with huge sneakers and really big hair stopped to say hi. “Is this your family?” he said. He spoke like he had a hearing impairment. I said yes. “It’s good,” he said. “I grew up with foster families. Real family is better.”

Choose your own ending. Both of these are true things I thought:

1. My heart seized. You stupid woman, I thought. Just appreciate your damn babies and shut up.

2. So I decided to keep the shouting baby after all.

Posted in Fresco, new westminster, outside, the parenthood, trombone, two! children!, whiny | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments

In Which Our Souls Are Definitely Captured

Posted on 11/24/2008 by cheesefairy

I consider myself photogenic in a fairly specific way. If I am captured on film doing something I enjoy, while I am actively enjoying it and am in no way aware that the camera is on me? I am pretty nice to look at. (Unless I am singing at karaoke and then I look batshit insane. Just like you do.) But any other time, it’s hit and miss. I ham it up if I know the camera is there. I have a collection of shit-eating grins I haul out for pictures. I am not very good at smiling with my eyes. My angles are kind of funny; my mouth is crooked so if you photograph me in repose I have Mean Mouth, my nose is getting bigger by the day and my hair is often unruly. Unruly like an LA riot.

To sum up: I am a creature who looks best when animated. If I were on a reality show about models, (and that is the biggest, most scornful IF you will see all day, my friends) the host would say, “In PERSON I get a model, but her film is TERRIBLE.”

Fresco has inherited this characteristic. In person, he is freaky cute. On film he looks like an angry old man. Partly this is the curse of the camera, so attractive to him that he must concentrate on catching it and eating it and cannot unfurrow his brow for one second to look adorable. But mostly I think it is just the way we are in our family. I should say, our family excluding SA and Trombone because I think they generally photograph quite well.

(The caveat here is that I take the most pictures of my kids and I am not a professional and I am using a simple point & click camera. With a real photographer, and I know there are lots of you out there, Fresco might be Canada’s cutest baby but no, actually, I think he’s just got lots of Personality and needs to be seen up close and personal to be believed. Don’t forget your earplugs, though.)

When Trombone was 3 months old we went to Sears for our first family portrait. I think we did it because we were at the mall and needed something to do and Christmas was coming. It turned out well – Trombone was young and easily amused and grinned it up nicely for the camera. Last year we sent Trombone on his own because we had to work but we wanted photos for our Christmas cards. He happened to be coming down with a really bad flu that day so the photos are kind of sad looking. There was one where he was actually crying but trying to smile through the tears. Very Liza Minelli.

This year we went with both boys and got one portrait of all of us and then a bunch of just the boys because they are way better looking than us. I think it is because they are getting full nights of sleep and we are not. Oh and because they don’t have to deal with themselves all day.

When the photographer offered us her favourite, most popular background we said sure, until she rolled it down and it was this crazy Donald Trump / Thomas Kinkade Christmas tree, all gold and green and lights and freaky ornaments – okay it doesn’t sound that weird but go to that Thomas Kinkade link (incidentally, holy shit I had no idea there was so MUCH Thomas Kinkade crap out there!) and you will see what I mean except imagine it 7 feet tall and behind you – I would bet money that in 5 more years there will be a Make-Your-Own-Blinky-Light-Christmas-Portrait with this tree in it. We shook our heads, well actually, I was all “Oh hell yes!” but SA was more, “Oh hell no!” so we went with a nice calm snowdrift background. And then the poor photographer tried to get what she would call “good” pictures of us. Classic family poses.

See, I think of the Sears Portrait (or department store portrait of your choice) as High Cheese and that is the point for me. I want us to look like us, in front of an amusing backdrop, in poses we don’t normally strike. I am muzzy on this, like the rest of my memories but way back in 199something, Sarah won a free portrait from The Bay and it was 11 x 16, mounted, and we went in the two of us and chose a painter’s dropsheet background and pulled out cans of fake paint and paint brushes from the prop box and insisted on posing with them. THAT picture will be in the Department Store Portrait Hall of Fame, right at the front door.

But the photographers who work in the studios, they have to take it seriously. Because people do, they come in with their 2 day old infants dressed in Christmas Finery and then spend half an hour blowing on them to keep them awake to capture the moment. In all seriousness. I saw it happen while I was waiting to pick up our pictures the other day.

Which is cool. I’m not dissing your baby or her pictures. It’s just not why I go to the Sears portrait studio. I do it for fun.

Now Trombone is great. He follows directions, knows how to say “STINKY” on cue to make a cute smile, yes, has a home-done haircut but whatever. He’s cute. SA and I, well, we know no one is really looking at us anyway and we are 36 and 34 respectively so we can manage to smile for 10 minutes straight and still attempt to wrangle our children. But Fresco, king of the flirts, smiliest baby of all, just stared at this photographer like she was The Satan. Would not smile. Would not laugh. Would not look at the dangly birdy. Just. Kept. Staring. Who are you and why are you shaking your HOLY CLEAVAGE! in my face?

Many poses followed. We got some we liked. Then the photographer said, OK now let’s do my favourite shot. She brings back the crazy Christmas backdrop, gets a fake glass of milk from the prop box, hands it to Trombone. She gets a fake plastic plate with chocolate chip cookies glued to it, hands it to Fresco. She gets an elbow-length Santa Claus glove, hands it to SA, tells him to put it on. SA is out of the shot but his Santa hand is in it, reaching for the cookies and milk. And I guess the kids are supposed to look at him and be all, whee it’s daddy! but on film it will look like, whee it’s Santa! I don’t know. Mr. Jay was not there to speak to the artistic vision.

First, Fresco shoves the plate in his mouth. He’s teething, you see. Then Trombone has a look at the plate and manages to pry one of the glued-on cookies off. Fresco reaches for that, too. The photographer is peeing her pants laughing because I guess she’s never photographed a baby that puts things in his mouth before; in other words it must have been her first day. We got a few shots and then put her out of her misery and left.

Even though the Sears Portrait studio will never put any of our shots on their wall for other customers to look at, to me, ours are perfect family portraits. I love them. When I look at them on my Portrait Wall (oh I am so serious) in 5 or 50 years, I will remember what everyone was like, how we all felt, that poor photographer yelping, “HEY BABY LOOK AT ME BABY!” the baby giving her his best Withering Stare and Trombone silently wishing he was back in the waiting area playing with the talking Dora the Explorer Kitchen.

Our photo session captured so many moments that accurately represent my offbeat, super animated, decidedly not picture-perfect family. And so, department store portrait studios, you will always have my heart and my money.

(This is the one where Santa was supposed to be taking the plate of cookies away. To the photographer’s surprise, we ordered two 5X7s.)

<i>You know what, Santa? I DON'T BLOODY THINK SO.</i>

You know what, Santa? I DON'T BLOODY THINK SO.

Posted in cheese, Fresco, funny, trombone, two! children! | Tagged , , | 24 Comments