things they say

Malli has a new haircut. His first professional haircut. I used to do it myself but he always resisted. I’d resort to slipping a towel under him while he slept. Then I’d cut whatever hair was accessible and try to turn him over without waking him up so I could cut the other side. His sleepy hands would flail out, knock into the scissors and wake him up. It would take several nights to get all the way around his head and he’d walk around with half a haircut in the meantime.

He sat beautifully at the hairdresser’s. It took about 10 minutes and he hopped down looking like a little businessman. Another parent remarked that he looked like he was on his way to Bay Street (where all the lawyers and bankers work). But it seems he has other plans:

A conversation with Malli, while driving behind a garbage truck:

Mom! That guy is riding on the outside of the truck!

Yeah, garbage workers get to do that. Looks fun eh?

Yeah. When I get taller I’m going to drive a garbage truck. And I’m going to pull the magic wand and then all the garbage gets squished up into the truck so you can’t see it.

A conversation with Akka:

Mom, is it true that life’s a butter dream?

What do you mean?

What does ‘life’s a butter dream’ mean?

Do you mean ‘life is but a dream?’

What does it mean?

It’s from the song. Row row row your boat. It means that drifting down the stream is so peaceful and nice that it makes life feel just like a dream.

Oh my god!

What?

The world is so fabulous.

never say never

Two new toys. The last toys I thought would ever cross the threshold of our house. Two of them. And I bought them myself.

Akka has shown a passing interest in Barbies. I always scoffed at them and, being no dummy, she picked up on that. Once, in a toy aisle, she stood captivated by shelf after shelf of pink, self-effacing, narrow-waisted, big-busted, small-footed Barbies, then turned to me with a shy look and said “we don’t want to buy those, right?”. Right. I didn’t. She did, though.

Last week my friend and her son came over for lunch. Three-year-old E. walked through the door carrying his sparkle Barbie. Akka was captivated and played with it whenever E. let it out of his grip. After they left she asked me for one outright. Something occurred to me: if my son asked me for a Barbie, I’d probably get him one. And I’d be weirdly proud of it. We’ll see…

I have the girly debate frequently with my friends who are parents. It’s not much of a debate, really; it’s us congratulating ourselves on not succumbing to the aggressive Disney-Barbie marketing campaigns and sharing proud stories about how, due to our successful stonewalling, our daughters can’t even tell the difference between Ariel and Belle. But Akka’s interest was piqued and the issue kept coming up. A friend sent me a link to an online discussion about Barbies. One mom was bemoaning the fact that her daughter wanted one and most of the responding moms were telling her to lighten up. Something struck a chord:

“… now I worry that by making them forbidden fruit she wants them all the more. We have tried explaining why we don’t like them, but this seems to really hurt & embarass her, she is very sensitive and she then feels as though she is doing something wrong in wanting them.” (motheringdotcommunity)

That’s what I’d inadvertently done to Akka. She knew she wasn’t supposed to like the things she liked. What kind of message is that? Other moms on the discussion forum talked about their kids building cardboard box houses for their Barbies, cooking and feeding them pretend food, creating clothes out of paper and fabric scraps, building shoebox cars for them and basically just playing. They’re just dolls. They’re just toys. So I went to Value Village where second-hand Barbies are disturbingly sold in clear plastic bags:

photo credit: Jodi Green on Flickr

I sorted through them and found two clean and clothed and un-chewed ones to bring home. She couldn’t believe her luck.

Their names are Daisy and Lisa. They play Simon Says. They sleep in a little basket. They have unrealistic body proportions and permanent make up. Daisy can only walk on tip toe (or, presumably, in high-heeled shoes). Malli took Lisa for an airplane ride. We don’t need to watch Barbie movies or buy Barbie backpacks or get the lavender camper van. Just two new dolls and a happy little girl.

broken wand

Akka got a magic wand for Christmas. I embraced the girly toys to the extent that I could and got her a tiara, a wand, fairy wings and a pair of long white gloves.

The wand was a big hit. Spells were cast, objects appeared and disappeared, and there was much magic. Then, the other day, she was sitting quietly, absentmindedly playing with the wand, when it snapped. She looked immediately distraught, shot me a look, then said “It’s ok. It’s mine. I don’t care” as her mouth turned down at the corners.

‘Oh no!’ I thought. ‘Not real life! Not disappointment, sadness, and an awareness of the built-in obsolescence of cheap plastic toys!’ It broke my heart a little bit that she was so sad about her wand and that she didn’t want to show me her sadness. She brought me the wand, I deemed it irreparable, and found myself quickly offering to get her another one. I tried to console her, asked her if she wanted a hug and she said “No!” even as her arms opened and she fell into mine.

We tried to glue the wand but it didn’t work. We tied a string through the butterfly-shaped top of the wand and created a ridiculous bit of bling that she wore around her neck to school. Since then, both she and Malli have been casting spells, making objects appear and disappear, and spreading much magic with the headless wand. Real life. Disappointment. Learning that when cheap plastic stuff breaks it doesn’t really matter.

a good day

Today I had a meeting for my new consulting gig. I got up, tried on my suit, felt briefly elated at how well it fit until I realized it wasn’t my sleek, fitted, pre-child suit, it was my fat suit. The post-partum-and-early-pregnancy one. Still, it looked pretty good. K. packed the kids off to school and daycare and I enjoyed a rare few moments alone drinking tea. Not wanting to show up for my meeting with icicle hair, I spent some time tracking down the hair dryer. It was at my next door neighbours’ house and had been for quite some time without being missed. Hair dry, quick polish of the shoes with a diaper wipe and I’m out the door.

I got home at noon with no particular plan for the afternoon. I’ll admit I was feeling rather pleased with myself having landed a consulting job and organized the part-time child care required to carry it out. This will be, I hope, the start of a new rhythm of work and parenting for me. I’ve done all or nothing on both sides: full-time work and full-time childcare, no work and no childcare. I’m edging my way toward something in the middle.

So, I got out of my suit and took the kids skating. They were amazing. Akka can really wobble along and Malli picked up quite a bit of speed pushing a chair. They were happy and excited and full of energy and lovely and encouraging with each other. They invented falling-down games and chanted “falling is part of skating!”. They slid in the snow piles and then walked all the way home kicking chunks of ice until they disintegrated under their boots.

At home, Akka and I made two sock puppets. This is how we occupy socks that have lost their mate.

Malli played doctor. He donned his stethoscope and wandered about looking for hearts to listen to. He’d walk up to K. and say “this is going to hurt a little bit. A teeny tiny bit. [poke, poke] … How old are you? … ok. Where is your heart?” He’s not quite cardiac surgeon material yet.

Lying down with both kids in bed, Akka asked me to tell her a story from when I was a little girl. She often asks for these and I usually conjure up an image from childhood and just describe it to her. They’re not stories, really. I always try to think of myself at her age and see what I can remember from that time. Today I told her two stories:

1. When I was a little girl we went to visit my grandparents in Florida. They were my Nana and Pappa. The grass outside their house was different – it had thick blades and didn’t really stick up – it grew close to the ground. There were big round white stones in the grass that made a path. I used to jump from stone to stone and try not to touch the grass.
2. When I was a little girl and we were in Lesotho we went for a walk one day along a river. My dad carried me. We had to stop and wait our turn to cross a little bridge and when we stopped, my sister looked down and saw a baby cobra right in front of her foot. The cobra stuck its tongue out because that’s how snakes smell things and it licked my sister’s toe.

Then I told the kids I’d had such a good afternoon with them. Akka snuggled in and asked me “are we the best kids you’ve ever had?”.

They are.

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.