Going public

Akka goes to a public school. A big one. We did a bit of searching around as her junior kindergarten start date drew nearer and we had to pick an institution of lower learning. We live pretty close to two elementary schools. We chose hers because it has a French immersion program. Then we heard of a new public alternative school opening up nearby. I went to the information night and came away convinced that the big old impersonal public school was right for us. The alternative school did sound pretty cool at first. Its focus is on environmental issues and social justice. Who can argue with that? But I was wary of having our daughter’s first school year coincide with the first year of the school. And shouldn’t I be instilling in her a sense of environmental and social justice? I need school to teach her French and fractions and fighting (I mean, not fighting). How to interact with the earth and its fellow inhabitants; how to understand injustice and exploitation, class and race; her dad and I can help her make sense of that stuff around the dinner table.

I also grew a bit suspicious of the new school’s stated commitment to diversity. If you want diversity, why start your own school? This is downtown Toronto – aren’t the existing schools diverse already?

Indeed, they are. This point was driven home tonight when Akka and I attended her school’s winter concert. It was hot and crowded. Eager parents were standing up with cameras and waving madly to their better-behaved offspring on stage. There were several painful choral pieces but there was also a lot of cheering and a lot of smiling kids and a lot of ridiculously proud parents. There were Christmas songs and reindeer songs and some Hanukkah songs thrown in. About halfway through the show things turned pretty fantastic. Ghanaian drumming. Then, Ghanaian drumming accompanied by Ghanaian dancing. Then, more Christmas songs including the only tolerable rendition of Little Drummer Boy I’ve ever heard. More than tolerable, it had me dancing in my seat because it was preformed by the senior elementary steel band! Any school that has a potential future spot in its steel band for our Akka – with her German-Jewish middle name and her Singhalese-Sri-Lankan last name – has the diversity card well in hand.

Vancouver trip

The kids and I just got back from a trip to Vancouver to visit Granny (and to save me from ten days alone with two kids while K. went to conferences). It’s cliche to complain about the weather in Vancouver but come on! It rained on fourteen out of sixteen days. We visited all sorts of friends from my Vancouver days – many of whom now have children and my two played quite happily with different new kids every day.

And, we finally got to visit Collage Collage! My artistic and entrepreneurial and brave friend Erin did what she’s been talking about doing for the past ten years: she opened a shop where kids can make stuff, parents can buy stuff, and everyone can hang out in a beautiful bright (yes, even in the rain!) space surrounded by weird and inspiring things. We dropped by one afternoon to check it out (it was all-day-pajama-day for Akka):

We came home with a few new treasures including this roll-up pencil case:

A few days later we were back for a drop-in class where Erin led the kids in a book-making activity, complete with story time.

Plus, the shop has a little tucked-away play area that kept Malli entertained long enough for Akka to finish the whole class and not need to be dragged out by a frazzled apologetic mother with crayon-throwing brother under her arm. I’m pushing for a Toronto franchise.

H1N1 x 3

We’ve been flu’ed. We don’t know if it was the flu – H1N1 – the swine flu – but it was fluey and it’s now, thankfully, on its way out. Toronto is all a flutter with vaccine line-ups and vaccine shortages and vaccine debates and elbow-coughing and anti-virus stockpiling and hand-sanitizer-mark-ups and other general flu madness. Just as the hype started ramping up, I took to my bed with aches and pains. The stories of healthy children succumbing to the flu had been enough to make K. and I decide to vaccinate the kids but the clinics had just opened and we hadn’t done it yet. So, with flu in the house, I banned the rest of the family from my bed and used my occasional out-of-bed hours to disinfect faucets, doorknobs, light switches, hand-rails and drawer handles. I contained every cough, every sneeze. I’ve never washed my hands so often.

There were news reports of young women being hit particularly hard by this flu. I felt pretty sick but was never really worried. Besides, I had a trick up my sleeve to fool that flu. While lying in bed all a-fever’d, I ceased to be young and susceptible and turned 35. It was a crappy birthday but that virus woke up to find itself being fought off by a woman of respectable age. It never stood a chance.

The night of my birthday Malli’s fever started. Now we were scared. This is the boy who was hospitalized for pneumonia at five months old after waking up panting one morning after many nights of fever. We counted his breaths, called a Telehealth nurse who reminded us of all the worrisome warning signs, none of which he had, and made plans to have him seen by a doctor the next day. That night was long and hot. K. stayed with Akka in the healthy bed and Malli came to my sicky bed. I slept either holding his hand or with my arm resting next to his body so I could feel his tummy rise and fall. It reminded me of the first few nights with a newborn when you can’t really sleep because you have to check every twenty minutes to see that they’re still breathing.

The doctor prescribed Tamiflu for him. Then Akka’s temperature floated up and her prescription got called in the next day. The boxes of medicine say “for stockpile use only” on them. I wonder what they’re worth on the street? And I find myself feeling like I have to justify why my kids got some. It wasn’t hard to get – both the Telehealth nurse and our family doctor suggested it. The pharmacy had it in stock. But with people jumping vaccine queues (mostly, it seems, hockey players) and stockpiling Tamiflu in their fridges, it’s odd to hold two courses of the stuff in my palm.

However, we have it, and we’re using it, and we’re sleeping better knowing that the kids’ flu experiences will be shorter and less onerous because of it. Plus, it really works. The fevers come back each day but the kids aren’t miserable and, in fact, have a little too much energy for my liking. I don’t like them to be sick but I do like them to sleep during the day and those two often go together. Not on Tamiflu, apparently.

The biggest challenge has been getting the drug into them. It comes in powder-filled capsules. The kids can’t swallow them (we tried) so we cut open the capsules and sprinkle the powder on something they like to eat. In this way we’ve now forever ruined their taste for lime jello, cappuccino ice cream and honey. They’re growing suspicious of yummy spoonfuls coming at them twice a day. Akka spent over half an hour this morning licking microscopic bits of Tamiflu-laden honey off a spoon, making faces and gagging. She finally took it when I spread the drugged honey onto a chocolate chip cookie and let her eat that. Ridiculous. And familiar.

When I was small we lived in Lesotho for a couple of years. When we traveled to places where there was malaria we took chloroquine tablets. My parents would crush the bitter-tasting pill between two spoons, add some sugar water or jam, and feed it to me. It was awful. I can conjure up the taste now. I’m sure they balanced a precious dose on a spoon and said all the things I said this morning: “You have to eat it” “Just do it fast – it’ll be over in a second” “It’s just a taste” “Come on honey, it’s time” “That’s enough fussing – take it!” I remember worrying about the pills days before a trip. I remember thinking I’d do anything to get out of having to swallow them. Now I look at my daughter and I think ‘I know how you feel’. And now I also know how it feels to be your mom and to want to protect you. And although I’ve been on both ends of that bitter-tasting spoon, I haven’t thought of anything better than a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

rattlesnake update

Halloween is over and feels very far away. We’ve composted the pumpkins, turned the page on the calendar, and survived the flu since then. The rattlesnakes were a modest success. They weren’t great but they both got made and one got worn so that counts as a modest success in my book. The final design went like this:

Cut plastic ball in half:

Sew the half-balls to a green tuque, leaving about a third free so you can add lights inside the eyes. I used MEC turtle lights (thanks for the tip, PR!). Then I pinned on a pipe cleaner snake tongue.

Akka cut shapes out of foam sheets and I glued them on, then pinned a rattle onto the tail. I attached the snake to the back of the tuque with safety pins and that was that!

Malli was going to be the white-eyed version but he rejected the whole affair. Just as we headed out trick or treating I strapped his dragon hat on which was enough to convince the neighbours to give him candy.

 

 

getting it done

Today was one of those good days where you feel like a few things actually got done. With Akka at school and Malli occupied, I, for the first time ever, cleaned under the fridge. This is what I found (minus the dust and grime):

Moving the fridge left strange yellow streaks on the floor until I discovered the yellow crayon bit and pried it out from under one of the fridge feet. Sheesh.

Once Akka was home, we dug into pumpkin carving. I asked the kids draw what they wanted on the pumpkins and I would carve them out. Akka is sufficiently indoctrinated with Halloween tradition to know to draw a face. Malli not so much.

Malli’s creative vision for his pumpkin was a bit beyond my carving skills (my thumb has stopped bleeding, thanks for asking) so we compromized on two eyes and a mouth. He went to town with the butter knife, significantly enlarging one eye:

Then we had to turn off all the lights and close all the blinds for a test-lighting since waiting for the sun to go down was going to take way too long.

Unrelated to Halloween but related to getting-it-done: scrap metal collectors finally came by to collect our old garage door and all the leftover siding from the garage construction. And, the new garage door arrived and was installed allowing me to post the long-awaited Glorious, complete “after” shot (alley side):

Here’s a refresher:

before:

during:

after (garden side):

Done! I’m holding myself back from installing shelves and hooks and moving all the crap from the basement out there. Mostly because I have two rattlesnake costumes hanging over me but also because of some building inspection uncertainties. Good days where you feel like a few things actually got done still end with to-do lists.

How we saved $159.99

We moved into this house three weeks before Akka was born. We set up our room, the kitchen, and whatever else we had time for. We never set up a baby’s room because K’s parents were coming to visit a couple of months later and we knew we’d need the second bedroom for them. I figured the baby would sleep in a bassinet in our room and we’d buy a crib and create a baby’s room after they left. We never did.

The first time I shared a bed with my baby was the first time my baby slept in the outside world. Baby was born, baby lay down next to me, baby fell asleep, I fell asleep. The idea of putting this tiny little human package into a different bed – never mind a different room – seemed impossible. And ridiculous. And wrong. After that first sleep, it just felt normal to keep her with us. I’d read about keeping pillows and soft blankets out of the way. It felt safe and right. I slept better knowing I didn’t have to listen for cries and get up and walk down the hall to address them. She and I got into a rhythm. She would wake up, fuss a bit, roll over and nurse back to sleep. It got so neither of us really woke up. The interruptions were frequent, but they were gentle and quiet. I like to say that I never slept for more than two hours at a stretch for Akka’s first year. It sounds dramatic and terrible and self-pitying and it raises eyebrows with the moms at the drop-in centres. But the truth is, I was fine. I didn’t sleep for more than two hours at a time but Akka and I rode a rolling wave of sleeping and waking that left us both pretty well rested.

Then I learned to keep quiet about it. I was violating the Canadian Pediatric Society’s recommendations for safe sleeping environments. I knew lots of people who co-slept and felt vaguely guilty about it. To us, it seemed simply natural. Of my friends who were co-sleeping advocates, many had to convince their partners that it could be safe and that it was good for the family. K, however, being from Sri Lanka where co-sleeping is the norm, wondered what all the fuss was about. Of course babies should be with their parents. Where else would you put them?

So, we had our system figured out. It worked easily. When we traveled we never needed a baby bed – she always slept with us. When I was pregnant with Malli and started to need all the pillows to myself, Akka and K. moved to a futon on the floor of what would become the kids’ room. For a while we had a wonderful system where the kids slept on a futon on the floor of their room with a baby gate at the door. That way they could wake up and play but they couldn’t leave their room without waking one of us up first. Now that they’re four and almost-three, we’ve got a kids’ room and a grown-ups’ room and a queen-sized bed in each. Everyone sleeps where they sleep best. Kids start out in their bed, usually one or both moves in with us during the night, and if a parent feels over-crowded, there’s always an empty spot in the other room to move to. No crib, guest room ready whenever we need it, and no one sleeps alone. It’s perfect.

globalization, economies of scale, and two home-made rattlesnake costumes

The kids both want to be rattlesnakes for Halloween. I was a bit stuck on how to make their costumes. I posted as much on facebook and within minutes I had a wealth of brilliant rattlesnake costume ideas. Sewing tips, light-up eye ideas, the works. I hit the dollar store. Fourteen dollars later I had two pairs of tights, a pair of green socks, a bag of 5 plastic balls, two green toques, a pair of green mittens, pipe cleaners, and some foam sheets to cut into shapes. Back at home, the kids and I cut open an old pillow and stuffed ourselves a snake:

I’m a bit of a costume snob. I eschew the plasticy ones you can buy in the drug store. I’m not terribly crafty but I like the idea of piecing together their Halloween costumes every year. The rattlesnakes have proven to be a challenge, however. The prototype involves a plastic ball sawed in half, attached to a toque, with glowing red bicycle LED lights inside. I haven’t figured out how or where to attach the actual snake bit. They look cool but they look very home-made and, shall we say, rough around the edges.There are several kinks to sort out before the 31st.

Then, today, I took the kids to IKEA. Malli has reached that all-important childhood milestone of measuring 37 inches high and being allowed admission to the ball room. While they jumped and shrieked and buried themselves in balls, I browsed for a new duvet cover and ended up coming home with these masks:

Well, shit. I’d never be able to make something like these. Once I’d bought the fabric and the elastic and figured out how to do it, I’d have spent a fortune in dollars and time to put together two wee costumes. Home-made costumes just can’t compete with globalization. Just-in-time delivery, low overheads, low wages, high volume production and sales. One ladybug and one dragon neatly packaged up for $4.99 each. Made in Indonesia.

The dragon outfit has an additional power. It quickly yet harmlessly puts its wearer to sleep. A highly advantageous feature that IKEA has failed to recognize and properly market.

Even so, I haven’t given up on the rattlesnakes. I brought the ladybug and dragon home but they may live out their lives in the toybox and not actually venture out for treats with the other ghouls and goblins. I’m going to give those rattlesnakes another try.

new garage, part one

Over the past month we’ve been working (mostly mentally and emotionally, with a touch of physically) on getting a new garage. The lovely little green garage that came with the house was quaint and picturesque but it was also rotten, treacherous, and didn’t allow K. to stand upright or fully open our car doors. I have several rips in the back of my winter coat from snagging it on nails as I bent through a half-opened door to drag a sleeping child out of a rapidly cooling car. The garage had to go.

Before (I was pruning. That’s why I’m in the tree):

I took care of the demolition. It was slow and methodical. While the kids slept or played at a safe distance, I carefully dismantled plywood sheathing and bone-dry planks and sodden mouldy roofing. I piled all the debris nail-side down. I cleaned up the one window pane that shattered.

Then, one weekend, we invited friends and neighbours over for the final tear-down. They were less methodical but rather more effective:

Last view of old garage:

Blank slate:

Next steps:  excavation, gravel, building forms, pouring concrete:

Skate park!

From this point on it’s brother-in-law MC on the job. Framing walls:

Attaching tin siding:

Side walls up:

Drill…. Beer….

Raising the front wall:

Cheering section:

Looking like a garage! This is the work to date. Glorious, complete “after” shot coming soon.

kindergarten!

Akka started school today. Two and a half hours of her being cared for by someone we didn’t have to pay. It took four years and three months of being parents before we were able to take advantage of a publicly-funded childcare program. For two and a half hours a day. Still, it was nice to drop her off and then walk past the office without having to go in and write a cheque.

Rant aside, she loved it. She raced into the classroom grinning. No tears, barely a backward glance. I spent the afternoon trying to extract small bits of information about her day. I learned that she met two kids: Oliver and Nathan. They went downstairs to music class and sat in a circle and sang ABC while the teacher played guitar. They went to yoga class and sat cross-legged (“like Buddha”) with palms together, breathing in through their noses and out through their mouths. Eyes closed but it’s ok to peek if you want to.

There were various name-tag-making activities. There was a book about bunnies. The books go in the basket.

On meet-the-teacher day and the first day of school I’ve offered her her choice of breakfast. The first day it was grilled cheese, the next it was quesadilla. She eats without fussing and we’ve managed to leave the house without crying, dragging, threatening or pleading (the four reasons I gave up my job and stopped taking them to daycare in the first place). So that’s good. But I’m worried I’ve set a precedent for cooked breakfasts and I have no intention of firing up the stove for anything other than tea before nine in the morning. For tomorrow, I offered her cereal or a bagel and she chose pasta. We have leftover pasta so I’ll go with it but I may be setting myself up for a series of breakfast disasters. Stay tuned.

chef’n it up

Culinary urges have taken hold. Since I’m not growing food this year, I’m trying to make fresh in-season food to eat and possibly to store. I came home with two big bunches of basil from the farmer’s market and prepared my first-ever batch of pesto. It’s delicious because parmesan cheese may be the most plentiful ingredient.

Ready for the freezer:

Kale chips are a new favourite around here. Sprinkle kale leaves with oil and salt and bake for 8 or 10 minutes until crispy.

And just in case all the deliciousness was going to my head, full disclosure requires that I admit that my oatmeal chocolate chip cookies continue to fail by smearing themselves all over the pan and turning themselves into granola bars.