We’ve Told Him The Song is Called “Secret Banana”

Posted on 9/5/2008 by cheesefairy

Oh g’wan. Allow me this extra 2 minutes plus of hubris. Kthx.


Secret Banana, Secret Banana from tortured potato on Vimeo.

Posted in Fresco, music, trombone | 10 Comments

A Fool Like Me

Posted on 9/4/2008 by cheesefairy

Last week I went to my daytime workplace jobtype office and had a visit with the people I like there. Fresco was on his best behavior. He smiled, he giggled, he played nice. He fussed a bit, he slept a bit.

“He’s so easygoing,” said someone.
“Oh yes,” I preened, “you know when Trombone was this age, I had to turn the vacuum on at least once a day to calm him down. But here we are at 4 months old and Fresco is just, you know, sailing through.”

Like that hot dog you ate last week, the one you didn’t think twice about but now you’re wondering – is it the dreaded listeria that is making me so tired? I remembered the above conversation today as we drove home from my parents’ house, Fresco doing a cat-coming-down-from-acid-trip imitation while Trombone tried half-hearted comfort. “HUSS. HUSS. It’s alright Fresco. HUSSSS!!!!!”

Why was he crying? Because he hates the car? (yes) Because he had two naps today, sum total of which = 1.5 hours (yes) and this after a night of 4 wakeups because the poor dear keeps rolling over in his sleep and hasn’t figured out how to roll back yet? (yes!) Because he is teething and wants to eat the buckle on his car seat but instead was rubbing his hand almost raw in an attempt to get it in his mouth or get his mouth on it he doesn’t really care which? (yes, as it turns out).

I got so cocky as to break the first rule of parent club. Hell, the ONLY rule of parent club, as far as I’m concerned. Thou shalt shut your damn mouth about how great your kid is until the kid is in college.

Now we’re screwed. With Trombone, yes, you had to hold him through every nap every day until he was 10 months old. Yes, you had to either nurse or rock and jiggle and shush him to sleep every time, sometimes for an hour or more. Yes, there was that let’s walk around for an hour so you’ll go to sleep in the stroller phase. But at least there was always something that worked. Fresco has been soothing himself to sleep since he was 4 weeks old, which has been great, these 16 weeks. But now that he can’t do it because he keeps. on. rolling, we have nothing else. We have no plan B. He hates the stroller. He hates the car. He (often) won’t be jiggled. If he goes to sleep nursing he’ll be up in 45 minutes with partially digested burp pain (Trombone NEVER BURPED). He’s too strong to swaddle. He mocks the big sleeping bag that kept Trombone pinned for months.

He also doesn’t like it if you hold him down and hiss go to sleep you little monkey’s ass in his ear. FYI.

Screwed, I say.

And all because I let my hubris drive the boat for 10 minutes. Parents, HEED! Obey the club rules or suffer the consequences.

Posted in Fresco, the parenthood, whiny | 5 Comments

Post 1099 Has No Title

Posted on 9/1/2008 by cheesefairy

As part of the eternal quest for ME TIME, I went out today in search of a nice little salon where I could get my hair highlighted. I seem to have this bad habit of coming up with random schemes and then trying to make them happen on a shoestring. Yesterday I decided all I wanted was highlights, today I tried to make it happen.

Though this is New Westminster, land of a thousand hair salons, it is also The Mizzle, where nothing is open on Monday even when it’s NOT a holiday. So I soldiered on to Burnaby and there I also found precisely nothing. I was avoiding malls because it is the last day before school starts. Suddenly realizing I was squandering my ME TIME, I went into the closest Shopper’s Drug Mart and bought a home highlighting kit for $14.99. Suck it, salons of The Mizzle and Burnaby.

Of course by the time I got home to play with my highlighting kit, I had precious little time to do the work so the bleach got left on a little longer than it might have been at a real salon. I was cooking chili while the bleach was bleaching and then the baby woke up from his nap and wanted food and then I was concentrating on burping him without giving him a mouthful of peroxide and by the time I looked at the clock, it was Oh! I Must Go Rinse Immediately o’clock.

Blonde streaks do go a long way towards making a person think she is making a fresh start.

I also needed a new facial moisturizer which is how I came to an isle of the drug store that I do not usually frequent: skin care. My favourite facial moisturizer is a Body Shop brand but I figured: why not, I’m at a drug store and I have Points to use so let’s you and me pick something real special. I think I’m Worth It.

I probably don’t have to tell most of you how many insane combinations of herbs, spices, flavours and oxides there are in the facial care arena. You can be preserved, rejuvenated, invigorated, detoxified, de-linified, plumped and protected from sun, all for only $50 a jar. It’s wild. The new thing appears to be caffeine, which Sarah wrote about the other day. There were a lot of products that contained caffeine, none of them edible.

There were two lightweight L’Oreal moisturizers on sale. I had a really hard time deciding. Would it be the Hydrafresh gel-creme “charged with multi-minerals”? The Advanced Revitalift? Skin Genesis Multilayer Skin Strengthening Formula? (Sadly I did not see the moisturizer named “Happyderm” that I just now found on the L’Oreal website because Happyderm would have been a shoe-in.) After much pondering, I went with the Hydrafresh, in part because of its “exhilarating citrus fragrance.” I hope it was the right decision. If I am writing next week that I have no skin on my face, you are all my witnesses.

In the clearance isle I made a spectacle of myself laughing at a product by Curel, a company I tend to associate with Real Science for whatever reason. It was on for half price at $4 and it was called Pregnancy and Motherhood cream. It’s OB-GYN tested! (I am assuming tested by not tested on.)

I am not lying. Look here. See, when you’re pregnant, your skin is stretching. So you should moisturize it. With special pregnant lady cream. Sure – I’ve heard of pregnant belly cream. Because the Industry wants you to think you can cure or prevent stretch marks. (Insert loud buzzer noise here.)

What confused me was the “motherhood” part of the equation. Motherhood cream? No one told me there was a cream for motherhood! The website explains: “[our cream] also relieves dry, tight skin, making it soft and comfortable, including postpartum skin.” Hi, Curel! My postpartum skin is neither tight nor dry. It is loose from the stretching and moist from all the baby saliva I am doused with whenever I go within 4 feet of my baby. But thanks. Nice try.

Curel also makes the next two steps of cream for women. They call it their “Life’s Stages” line. Next stage: anti-aging and then, super-menopause. I would bet dollars to donuts each of those bottles contains exactly the same moisturizer as every other bottle of moisturizer in the world. Except for my Hydrafresh. It’s different.

I did not buy the Pregnancy and Motherhood cream. Even though it was only $4. I think this shows remarkable restraint and proves that I am a changed woman now that it is September.

Posted in everything, funny, hair, new westminster | 2 Comments

My Summer Vacation

Posted on 8/31/2008 by cheesefairy

You might think that with six days off, as in, six days of co-parenting because Saint Aardvark has had six days off, I might have found more time to write here.

What have we done. We have gone to the Fabulous PNE. Twice. We took Trombone last Wednesday and spent 90 minutes using up his attention span and good graces and then headed for the exits. One train ride, one giant tub of popcorn, the ketchup-y part of a hamburger and a deep fried Oreo were all we had to supply to keep sir happy. His favourite part was the Toon Town Parade, for which we were front row – look waaaay up at the giant Thomas the Tank Engine float, it’s smiling at you. Trombone danced and cheered and exclaimed so that I hardly had time to be cynical about the people dressed as Care Bears dancing down the road.

Did I mention the deep fried Oreo. I did? OK.

Saint Aardvark and I went back the to the Fabulous PNE just the two of us last night, for a date, because it is tradition. We drank $7 cups of beer and walked against the crowds and saw Chilliwack play three songs and actually stayed up until 10:30 PM to see the show stopper ROLLING THUNDER, a country-music themed pyrotechnic spectacular holy shit. We arrived home at 11:30, drunk on freedom as much as the modest quantities of alcohol, hit the hay at close to midnight and were, of course, woken by our rude children at 3:30 (for milk) and 6:15 (for kicks) and thus another day began.

Tonight it is September eve and one more day of vacation remains. The cold evening air is pouring in the window next to me. August – what August? July – what July? These months a blurry background for my sharp, too-real days.

For some reason, I am excited about September. The prospect of it feels like an exhale after a long, held breath. I feel September will have structure, measure, is this because it is Back To School month and 18 years of Back To School have conditioned me so? Or is it because I can feel my feet beneath me again 4 days out of 7 and that is both a majority and an improvement.

I am not so excited that I’m going to stay up till midnight and ring in a new month. I’m not that crazy. Just crazy enough to say Happy September and mean it.

Posted in outside, trombone | 3 Comments

Begin Again

Posted on 8/26/2008 by cheesefairy

I remember the day Trombone was conceived. I remember the circumstances surrounding the day, how I felt, how badly I wanted that baby to come into being. I was not sure that there was a pregnancy to accompany my conviction until two weeks later but I would have been very surprised had that stick come up with a single line. It felt like I summoned him.

I do not remember the day Fresco was conceived. But I remember the day I found out he was there, here inside me, microscopic, unintentional. It was one year ago tomorrow.

One year ago today, I worked my last day before a much anticipated 6-day vacation. I tied up loose ends and was exhausted and kept going on momentum and excitement and picked up Trombone from daycare and said, mama’s gonna be home for a whole week! and he was appropriately happy about it.

That night I drank a few glasses of wine and read the Internet and probably stayed up until 10 because hey, I was on vacation. I was blissfully unaware that my world, our world, had already changed.

And so, Fresco, your anniversary day, your conception day, is the day I found out about you. A marvelous surprise, a complete mystery, I have no idea when or how you came to be, but you did.

Tonight I rocked you to sleep, something I do not usually do. You had been awake for a couple of hours and really should have gone to sleep an hour earlier but what can I do, I have your older brother to contend with and he is a bit squirrely between the hours of 4 and 6 pm. It took some doing but you finally stopped thrashing about and just nestled in my arm, murmuring your sleep song. You kept one fist tightly wrapped around my thumb. Your little hairs spiked up at the back of your head from your bath.

I was thinking, as I looked your slightly biggish ears: On this evening one year ago I didn’t know you existed. And that’s weird, in a way that it wasn’t with your brother. Both of you were not there one minute and there the next. But with you there was a whole 4 weeks after that minute where you existed and I had no idea. Like someone who finds a family of raccoons in her garage or that her lover is cheating, I kept asking anyone who would listen,but how long? How long has this been going on? How could I not know?

I was walking in the rain on Sunday and listening to music as I walked and this whole year came spinning back, my initial shock when I saw those two lines, the dreamlike state of the first few weeks I knew about you, the sudden rush of joy I felt the first time I heard your heart, the day I cried because what had I done and then I lay still on my bed and I felt you move for the first time. How your dad and I sat, wrinkled brows, re-jigging our family priorities, re-balancing our budget to accommodate you, to accommodate the way we want to take care of you and your brother.

And then you arrived that morning in April; one minute you were inside and the next you were outside. Four months since that day, one year since the other; I can still hardly believe you are here. I guess it is because I am someone who plans things but I did not plan you. I see now how planning might be overrated. How wonderful surprises can be.

Posted in Fresco | 3 Comments