Happiness

Tonight Steven and I were at the hospital. There is something I like about the hospital - the smell of their linen. They use a strong but un-perfumed detergent that smells clean - not a chemical approximation of clean like fabreeze but clean like homemade soap. And I like their linens. I like the flannel sheets they use on the beds. I like the worn cotton of those green pants stamped with the hospital name. I've only been in the hospital for the birth of Thomas, ultrasounds and visiting Shirley. Except for visiting Shirley, which was kind of stressful because she wanted me to help her escape, all those Campbell River hospital experiences were good thus, the smell of the hospital linens still smell good.

Tonight we were at the hospital for an ultrasound. And there was a little curled up creature with a black and white flutter for a heart beat, laying in the soft cushion of my uterus. Phew. There was one rough weekend where we thought it was over - the pregnancy that is - so this ultrasound was reassuring.

I have hope for two other babies waiting to be born. My business, Read-TV (educational videos) and a new, real, hosted from home blog. I need to finish the first Read-TV video before the baby is born but this first trimester has been exhausting and I no longer work when Thomas naps but nap when Thomas naps.

And then there is that other baby of ours, Anka. Still looking for a good home for a mellow affectionate (unless you bite him) big dog.

Sadness

Yesterday Thomas bit Anka and Anka bit Thomas back. I was two feet away, making lunch, my back turned to both of them. I thought as I heard Anka bark and Thomas cry, "good now Thomas might understand what happens when he bugs the dog." I finished rinsing the rice noodles with cold water before I turned around. Why should I let a daily event ruin the rice noodles? Thomas was very upset. When he gets really upset he throws up. He threw up. He was holding his cheek. He told me between sobs that he bit Anka and Anka bit him. Where did he bite you? I asked. He said right here and showed me his cheek. His cheek was fine. No red marks. Thomas and I sat on the couch while he calmed down. Anka was sent outside. Thomas just stared out the front window dazed. I was dazed too.

An hour later I'm trying to get socks on a little thrashing body and I got smashed in the face with a book. I go and cry in my room. Thomas comes in and gives me kisses on the face just as I did to him on the couch earlier. We pick Thomas' friend from kindergarten. Mother's and caregivers in a knot around the metal kindergarten door. A little french goodbye song drifts through. It is sunny and the sky is a washed winter blue with stripes of still, white, flat clouds.

At home I notice a red spot on Thomas' head. It's a scab. It's the size of Anka's tooth. That means Anka's open mouth reached the top of Thomas' head to the bottom of his cheek bone that he was holding earlier. It was a warning bite and one of Anka's teeth broke through Thomas' skin.

Anka has to go. Is there another way? Lately, each day with Anka and Thomas has been feeling like damage control - and now we have some visible damage. Damage control between a two year old and a sibling is one thing but damage control between a two year old and a 150 lb dog is quite another - if only in consequences which, neither of them fully understand.

I move between sadness and relief that Anka will be going. Crying between planning to get the rugs cleaned and wondering how we will get rid of the dog couch. No more pooh to pick up but no more old friend. Luckily there are some ready-to-be-sent-out Christmas pictures of Thomas on my desk to remind me what is really important here. Not that it stops the tears when, in times like this, I truly realize I will lose my dog.

Anka isn't here now. Thomas didn't learn any lessons and later that afternoon he took to throwing a large horse at Anka's head. I got Leila to come and take Anka away. I hope we can find a good home for him quickly.

Pieces of today like broken ice

A hard drive slowly dies. Bad sector by bad sector until the accumulation renders it useless. We can only wait for our tech-man. He daylights as a machinest. I am without spellcheck. Dictionaries are so full of pages to turn. The kitchen smells. Plates and pans collect - bad sector by bad sector until accumulation renders the kitchen useless. Thomas is sleeping. A fresh small person with many ideas and a memory of two years. Two of the three houses I can see from my back window ripped off their wood and replaced it with vinly siding - both in a metallic milky tea colour. I would never drink my tea with that much milk and metal. Thomas loves to break ice. Thin sheets slatted together in frost-like patterns. Thick round pieces the shape of bowls. The large rectangle of ice from the top of the rubber maid box. He breaks it by throwing it, by stepping on it, by smashing it with his hammer. He shares the smaller pieces with the dog. I noticed today he was eating some too. Ice is not regular here. Our dog sleeps when Thomas sleeps. That is what mothers are supposed to do; sleep when the baby sleeps. The dog is a good mother but I am a better one.

Goodbye Comments

I've spent 40 minutes trying to get the comments to work consistently and they don't. Perhaps I will try again another day or, someday, move to a better, better-looking, RSS enabled, permanent link system archiving, comment section featured, more personal-looking, Blog.

Yeah Canada Post!

Our post-person is good to us. Whenever there is a letter or package for Thomas she knocks on our door so she can hand it to him personally. He loves getting mail and since Gramma Annette has found out that our post-person hand delivers she is sending way more letters. Little notes about flat tires and moving vans - notes I am asked to read and re-read at least 8 times per letter.

I have no complaints about Canada Post and I don't know if I ever did. Letters with regular stamps are shuttled across provinces quickly and, within province, very quickly - a day or two to Victoria and three days to Vancouver. I like that the cut-off time for overnight or three day service is 4pm. I like their stamps, usually (I am not so keen on this year's Christmas stamps; skates doing an 80's, pop-out-of-a-box, peek-a-boo). We wrote to the Canada Post Santa this year and look forward to hearing from him. I can't link to information about that (pop-up window) but here is some information from Postal Planet:

"Currently, more than one million children write to Santa at his 'NORTH POLE H0H 0H0' address. Each letter that includes a return address receives a reply from Santa.

Almost 15,000 Postal Elves volunteer to help Santa with his mail. Letters are answered in English, French, and some 26 other languages, as well as Braille. E-mail will be answered in English or French."

Good Food and a Bad Dream

Live crab was on-sale at the grocery store - $5 a crab. I got two. Someday I would like to go to a restaurant where you're given big plastic bibs and large wooden mallets and crabs; a place with newspapers covering the table, a place they hose down the room at the end of the night. For now, I sit in the kitchen alone with a saucepan of garlic butter, halved steaming crabs and a nutcracker. The nutcracker is a crutch. It gets used a couple of times and then gets put aside for the superior instruments of the teeth, jaw and tongue. I find the meat doesn't get crushed and splintered when I use my mouth to crack open the shell. I found some sterling silver crab picks at the thrift store but those don't even make it out of the drawer anymore. They live in that nether land behind that plastic rectangle with recessed spoon shapes and fork shapes that holds the utensils - that dark place at the back of the drawer where rarely-used implements migrate. The thin final digit of the crab works better than the sterling tool.

Why am I eating crab alone? The crab work of dissecting and picking and crushing, and the occasional flying gob of flesh, makes Steven queasy. He'll eat it if I do the work but I am only that generous some of the time. Also, it takes so long to eat.

Crab is not a good choice of food for the really hungry - there is an added desperation in the ripping and searching for the bits of meat that can be uncomfortable.

This post wouldn't convince a non-crab eater to try crab but really, it was great. Oh and those barbequed oysters we had at Gary's birthday party last weekend...left on the grill until their shells open...a dash of something hot and something sour on top...mmmmmmmm.

I'm from Kitchener, Ontario originally. We had a kind-of-fresh-fish about three times. The whole house stunk of fish. It just didn't seem right - which is probably why we didn't eat it much. Kitchener, once Berlin, is a town with a large German population. We dined on sauerkraut, pigtails, summer-sausage and the sweetest market peaches from the Mennonites which, I've never found even close in quality since. Fresh maple syrup, free buses during Oktoberfest, mature deciduous trees that have a girth and width and bounty unmatched even here in the lush tall rainforests of this coast.

One of the beauties of moving is the change in food. There was this great pickled-type fish cheese and potato pie in Sweden, lentils (dahl) rice and spicy vegetables in Nepal - almost everyday, yogurt that comes packaged in waxed milk containers in Sweden and fresh papaya, guava, banana, mangoes and pineapples in Maui. The bananas - small wilder ones - taste so much sweeter that the monsters we get here.

But I haven't moved in almost a decade. Yesterday, in a job interview we got side-tracked and began talking of places we've lived and travelled and I forgot I had a child and forgot to check my watch. I was a half-hour late to pick him up at his friend's house. I've never done that. Last night I had a nightmare that I left Thomas and his friend on a side-street while I went back to get something. When I returned they were gone. I looked and yelled and got frantic. I was running around a parking garage screaming for them. There was Thomas passed out, being dragged away. I grabbed him and ran with him, I found some guy to call the ambulance. Steven arrived. "I have to find Kelsea," I said and I ran yelling KEL-SEA! KEL-SEA! KEL-SEA! I woke up. I couldn't sleep for a long time after that. I just heard Kelsea ringing in my head like an emergency bell.

A two year old with a secret

“Mommy is a ladder I climb up on.” That is what Thomas said as he was climbing up my bent knees and crashing into my stomach. I thought that was a good line because it really is what a mother is sometimes.

Today Thomas and I went to buy some Christmas presents. When we got home Steven asked, “What did you buy?”
T: Presents
S: Did you buy a present for me?
T: Yes
S: What did you get me?
T: Slippers.
It doesn’t take much to get a secret out of a two year old.

Just Now. Now.

I am buoyed by a sense of immutability - most of the time - floating on some thin skin belief in eternity - a gift of being raised catholic and three years of philosophical devotion to the Course in Miracles - and, distracted by those arbitrary issues which I raise like flags and let flap around for awhile. Sometimes these things give way, the thin skin doesn't hold some new weight or realization and I am devastated by the fragility of this life, of the enforced time-frame, of knowing how much and how many will be lost. Thank god the depth of these facts is usually lost on me or I would not be able to bear it.

Wrestling

Tonight Thomas and I went to visit Shirley. We usually visit one night every couple of weeks and watch the end of "Wheel of Fortune" and all of "Jeopardy." Tonight we stayed longer and watched wrestling. Shirley loves to watch wrestling. She watches it every Monday and Thursday on UPN. She laments that she can not watch the match to the death on pay per view three days from now. Here’s some wrestling inspired commentary:

“Oh there is that dirty Jap, I hate Japs. They’re always so sneaky and you can’t trust any of them.”

“That’s a big generalization and its racist” I said.

“I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them. That one there – he sometimes hides poison in his mouth and spits it in their eyes so they can’t see!”

And I watched the Japanese character. His back was bent like someone who was exaggerating sneaking. He ordered his two hench-men to beat on the American characters. He kept low, pretended to be beady eyed and popped up for the occasional well-placed, on the ropes kick.

“The Japanese are just people like us – we have different personalities among us and so do they. I can’t imagine a whole population to have the same character traits.”

“You’re right, I shouldn’t talk like that. There was some Japanese owned a big farm down the road but then they got taken away when the war started.”

And the wrestling went on. Thomas started body slamming Shirley’s stuffed dog. We ate coconut cookies and drank very pulpy orange juice. Shirley wasn’t transformed by our conversation and wandered back into her broad stereotypical ways. The last match we saw was a Latino against two-guys in fake leather pants. Two-guys manager was a woman of colour, totally buff with a whip and a bikini top and jiggle shorts. She whipped the two white guys a few times throughout the match. The wrestling website says she is their valet.

I am sure people have had a hey-day analyzing wrestling. It certainly carries a lot of cultural baggage – and so does Shirley.

If the Tent was a Portal We Wouldn't Need Shortcuts

There is a tent in my living room. It is a small tent but still restricts movement. The room in which I sit was originally intended to be a living room and a dining room. Now its a living room / my office / and a playroom. It holds a dog couch, a chair that will go to the dump very soon, a good chair, many toys, a child's table and chairs, plants, books, CD's, my desk, my filing cabinets and now the tent. We have a Pergo floor - the details of which remain unfinished - no molding and its not joined properly to other rooms. I notice that a lot of people who opt for Pergo get it almost all installed, quite quickly then let the details slide for months and months. Thomas is hitting me. I'm ignoring him. He needs food and attention. Here comes Steven singing "Here comes the Dad, here comes the Dad" (to the tune of hear comes the bride). I love Steven.

Today we went to Michael and Helene's house in Black Creek, to record music Michael composed for a children's video I'm working on. It was a successful visit and since we have five more pieces to set to music to we'll be there again. He gave me one of those short cuts that has so many right and left and left turns that you wonder if it really is the shorter way. "It's the way the locals go," he told me. Since I am going there again I'll clock it and see which is faster; the tricky-secret-local-way with over nine right and left turns (turn right at the water tower, left at the Pizza sign) or the straightforward way with three turns.

Nothing to write

I have nothing to write but I do have a new comments section (compliments of Enetation)

Some Things

Grandma’s houses are neat. Vacuumed. Dusted. Just so. Many Mama’s houses are messy - plates piled on the counter and dusting only occurring before Grandma visits. Kid’s rooms are comfortable. Piles of toys like projects, animal posters on the wall, forts in the closet. Garages on Vancouver Island are not used for cars – they are used for bikes and tools and boxes of things piled. In BC people call their places on the lake cabins. In Ontario people call their places on the lake cottages. If you ask an Anglican priest what time mass is at his church he will ask you if you are Catholic and it is not because you look Catholic. Tired dogs are good dogs. Tired children can be very frightening. I have a B.A. in English Literature and an M.ed in Curriculum and Instruction and I am afraid to use colons and semi-colons because I do not know how. Cutting cable does not save money if you start renting more videos. I am waiting for Steven to return from Blockbuster with Volume 2 Season 4 of the Sopranos. We are waiting, very patiently, for Season 2 of “Six Feet Under” to be released in Canada. The only time I miss cable is when I’m too tired to do anything else.

Late Afternoon

There are little pieces of music lying on the floor. She stoops, picks one up, rattles it near her ear until it starts playing and then frowns. She kicks another one, a tiny one, out of the way. Damn little pieces of music. There is some sun shining through a wilted fall lilac casting curled leaf shadows on her wall. Sun and shadows 3pm. It's almost time for the piano to get going. Damn that piano. She looks over to it. Eats the piece of music that made her frown and sits in her chair. The chair arms are threadbare where her hands rest. The piano begins to play. Her fingers curl up and pull out, curl up and pull out against the fabric. She does not move her hands in time to the music. The music comes in starts and spits. It gets all jivey, stops mid-chorus and then collapses into some sorrowful tune. All broken down palaces and dusty moth eaten ball gowns and women left on the 7th green to cry and straighten themselves. Thank God its almost 4 she thinks and when 4 comes the piano music stops. She gets up and sweeps all the shards and pieces of music from the floor, opens the cupboard beneath the sink and dumps them in the trash. Back at her chair she listens. They bang on the cupboard door - rattling it, they start to call her by name, they start crying. She puts on her coat and goes for a walk.

Happy Distraction

I don't usually peruse the comedy section of the video store but last night I did. I needed a happy distraction so I rented, The Impostors. All I knew about the movie was it was the same director and many of the same actors from Big Night (a great food movie - another great food movie if you haven't seen it is "Tortilla Soup"). The Impostors is full of physical humour and hijinxs. Who knew that Stanley Tucci (director) posing as a ship steward dropping a multitude of suitcases could be so funny?

If you and your family would like a happy distraction you could go to King Pacific Lodge tucked away in an inlet on the west coast of British Columbia. You and your family - two adults and one child - can spend a week on this floating lodge for $18 000 (Canadian funds). If the beauty and wonder of the area isn't enough distraction spending $18 000 in one week might be. I never imagined a fishing holiday could be so expensive. I notice their family packages aren't priced for more than two children. It's probably rare that someone in that income range has more than two children. The nice thing about living where I do is you know how to get these experiences for substantially less than $18 000. This also reminds me of tourism in the foothills and mountains of Nepal. You can go trekking on your own, on very well traveled trails, stay in tea houses for 30 cents a night and eat all you can eat Dahl for 10 cents. Or you can book a package and have someone carry your stuff and run ahead and set up your tent and you can eat cake while you watch Yak herders.

Halloween

Thomas was a butterfly. The first house we visited had a motion activated ghost. Thomas' pupils got huge and he visibly shook but he still said tricker' treat. The next house was fine but he kept glancing back to the ghost. And then someone threw a firecracker our way and that was the end of his candy trail.

It was close. Jack, grade 6, looked up at us lit firecracker in hand and froze. His impulse, there in front of me, his adult-friend, was to take it all back somehow. His friends said, "Throw it Jack!" "Throw it - there's a car" he snapped out of it and threw it. The car drove through smoke. He could have lost a finger had he waited any longer.

It's taken me ten years to get used to the fireworks on Halloween. That tradition doesn't exist in Ontario where I'm from. I've been shot at with a Roman Candle in Victoria and generally spooked by the noises and smoke and the possibility of injury. The fireworks gives Halloween a look of a riot, of chaos, of things not in order - perhaps important elemental Halloween things. I spent a bit of time researching the fireworks in BC but not Ontario phenomenon. Does it have something to do with Guy Fawkes Day? Or perhaps has origin in a tradition located in the strong BC Chinese-Canadian population? I wasn't able to find out. I wish I could tell you (or I wish I had a comments feature and you could tell me).

Some of the houses on busier streets looked sad. Multiple carved pumpkins, ghosts swinging in the trees and no kids. Like someone dressed up for a date that doesn't show up. Eagerly opening the door at the mere sound of humanity.