The Scrabbler

[The second instalment in a series of vaguely related events. Though, come to think of it, this one is decidedly irrelevant.]

It was Sunday night, the fourth consecutive night of familytogetherness. The professor was out for dinner with a colleague, so I said to the Gort, ‘I think you’re ready for Scrabble.’

As he led the way with the very impressive ‘mom’ in the center of the board, I thought to myself, ‘Scrabble with an almost eight year old is the way to go.’

Frankly, I’ve struggled with Scrabble. I like words, yes, but somehow when I stare at seven letter-squares resting upon a wooden stand, my mind just draws blank. I stare at the stand. I stare at the board. And instead of inspiration, I find nothing. Perhaps it’s the glacial pace of the game and the way all players spend long, quiet minutes just staring at the board.

Faced with the constraint of a timer (as in Boggle or WordTwist) I tend to fare better. My brain needs to be limited, it seems, in order to function. I’m not sure what that says about me.

But Scrabble with a second grader; someone whose vocabulary is limited to the very basic building blocks of the English language? Now that’s practically enjoyable.

Or so I thought, until I added up the scores and realized the boy had beaten me.

To be fair, I did ‘help’ him with most of the words, past the first handful of rounds, but still. He beat me. Or, even worse, I beat me.

The next morning, triumphant from his first Scrabble victory, the boy called to me from where he was sitting at the dining table. ‘Hey Mom! Scrabble?’

Sure.

We grabbed seven tiles and formulated words and I explained a little more of the game. ‘If you use all seven tiles at once you get 50 points plus whatever your word is worth.’

Little did I realize he’d absorbed the information as a challenge. Because next thing I knew, he carefully laid out his tiles on the table. ‘If I can find a D and an I, I can spell DISBELIEF,’ he mused, matter of fact. As if he were twenty years old. And I, suspended in a state of disbelief, wondered when he had learned that particular word.

I looked at his letters I-S-B-E-L-E-F. ‘It’s pretty hard [read: impossible] to find two letters to use,’ I dashed his hopes of getting that 50 point bonus. And then I stared at his tiles and stared at the board, in the off-chance I was wrong and there was, in fact, a free D and I within seven spaces of each other. ‘You could do BELIEFS instead,’ it finally occurred to me, when I spied a free S on the board.

And just like that, the kid scored 83 points, while I tried my best to compensate with the likes of ZEN and JOT.

(Without the benefit of triple letter score squares.)

The Library Card

[The first instalment in a series of somewhat-related-nonevents]

Though I do enjoy trying to navigate the chaos of the Superstore with three boy-children in tow, I’ve found a rather more desirable solution as of late: drop the professor and his spawn off at the library while I get groceries next door.

The youngest two boys sit in front of a computer while the Gort peruses books on rocks and spiders. [Side note: 'Mom, Grandpa and Grandma might die now that they're in Mexico,' he informed me last night. 'Oh', I questioned-replied, waiting for context to show up. 'Yes, there are venom[ous] scorpions there. Very venom.’] All while the professor gathers armfuls of Bjork CDs. [Side note: Have you listened to Bjork?  My cynical self tends to think the intelligent, artsy crowd like to let it be known that they listen to her; that her music really speaks to them. But frankly ever since she showed up at the Oscars in that swan outfit, I knew we could never be friends. Call me 'impatient, easily distracted, or obtuse', but Bjork [and the Tree of Life]: these are the things I just don’t get.

While the Johnson boys are increasing their intellect at the Signal Hill Library, I’m cruising the aisles of the Superstore, Groundhog-Day-style, for more. More cereal. More fruit. More Lindt Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt. Didn’t I just spend $150 like three days ago?

I shop in a fraction of the time [it's crazy how fast I can go when I cut out the whining, slow-walking middlemen] while silently criticizing the cart-driving skills of my fellow shoppers. Seriously: keep to the right, pass on the left. It’s just like driving.

But there are no perfect solutions in life and this books-and-groceries-at-the-same-time is no exception. Because it involves loaning the professor my library card. In theory it should be a straightforward affair: hand him the card, he checks out some resources, he returns the card to me. Like one of those ultra-basic organizational flow charts from the 90′s.

Instead, three days later, when I’m waiting to check out books for the second time that week, I open my wallet and see nothing in the slot normally occupied by my little blue card. When I get home, I ask the professor: ‘Can I have my library card back?’ And he says something like ‘I gave it back to you.’ And I say ‘no you didn’t.’ And he says ‘yes I did’ and he flips through the stack of expired cards in his wallet. Nothing. I turn my wallet inside out, and my purse, and the cup holder in the car where we seem to keep all manner of important items. Nothing.

I ask at the library. ‘I think my husband ‘accidentally’ left my card here last weekend.’ They flip through their stack of left-behind cards. Nothing. Another week goes by and I resign myself to forking over another $5 for a replacement card.

‘Are you sure you want to do this,’ the librarian asks before processing the replacement. ‘It might still turn up…..’

Pancakes and Milkshakes but not Waffles

‘Twas that most wonderful time of the year. That five-day February weekend culminating in my most favorite day of all: Family Day. [Because apparently Albertans don't spend as much time with their families as other Canadians?]

This year, thanks to not-entirely pleasant temperatures and bronchial distress (and, let’s face it: habit) we spent the five days mostly hibernating. Which is not the best way to approach five days of no school with three boys, but we pushed through and made it to today when the Gort ran into our room at 7.50am saying, in a panicky voice, ‘it’s 7.50am!’ worrying that 20 minutes might not be enough for him to eat a bowl of cereal and drive the three minutes to school. Apparently we parents are not the only ones feeling the effects of too much togetherness.

On Saturday – or Day 3 as I like to call it – when I managed to drag myself out of bed, I found the Hen had given himself a series of home tattoos. With a green marker. His nose. His upper lip. His cheek(s). His stomach. His back. The underside of his wrists? 

It was the kind of incident that perfectly sums up what I like to refer to as ‘the Johnson way’. A somewhat bizarre moment that almost certainly does not occur in other households. Like the Gort’s recent fascination with a pair of white gloves and a white baseball cap.

For the Grade 2 assembly, we received a little note – and by ‘little’, I do mean a trimmed piece of paper on which a few words were printed. (At least that’s what I think it was, because the note disappeared along with all the logistical information about the day and I was left scrambling…checking the school website, frantically emailing friends and asking teachers for information about the big day.) I believe the note instructed parents to send a ‘white accessory’ to school with their student for the final performance.

In this xy-chromosome-laden house, our accessories tend to be black. Not white. Save a rather tattered adult-size US Open Tennis baseball cap that a friend gave me many years ago. So at 8 o’clock the night before the big show, I drove to the dollar store in search of something white. I found a white feather boa. I called the professor. ‘Can you ask the Gort if he would like a white feather boa?’ Silence. ‘This is the Gort’s Dad,’ my better half finally mustered, ‘he would not like to see his son in a white feather boa.’ Fair enough.

I scoured the aisles and found a pair of white ‘manicure’ gloves (i.e. thin, cotton gloves) in the beauty section which, in my desperate state, I grabbed. Not entirely satisfied with dressing my child as a mime, I headed to Winners to see if they might have any white accessories. I found a white baseball cap (and three bars of Lindt Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt) and went home.

Well the Gort developed an attachment to his accessories and, for forty eight hours afterwards, could be seen wearing his detective coat, his white cap and his white gloves at all times. Even over his pajamas. (Though not upon his head as in the picture above, which he did solely for my ‘benefit’.)

The Johnson Way.

So, on Day 3 of Family Weekend, when the professor took his oldest two boys to Nose Hill for a rock-collecting expedition, one of them looked like a little green Martian. Other families go skiing, but the Johnsons cover themselves with green marker and go looking for rocks. The boys returned several hours later; the Gort’s school backpack filled halfway with a motley of very-similar-looking rocks. Enough rocks to fill four large yogurt containers. Seriously.

After they returned with their bounty, the professor made his specialty-dinner: pancakes, bacon and eggs; loved by all the boy-children. The Hen was playing in the basement with his brothers. Suddenly he sniffed the air – like a dog – announced: ‘I smell bacon’ and ran upstairs.

They polished off more pancakes than anyone should eat in a week and, at the end, the Gort thanked his dad for the meal. ‘Hey Dad, your pancakes are really delicious,’ he encouraged sincerely, ‘but not your waffles.’

The Hen chimed in, ‘yeah Daddy makes good pancakes….and milkshakes’ but not waffles.

Counting down the days till Spring Break.

I like meat a lot and happy Valentine’s Day

The doorbell rang while I was in the basement with the boys. I ran upstairs to get it, thinking a friend was standing on the other side with a book she thought I should read.

It was a girl I’d never seen before, with strawberry blond hair. A black binder in her hands. The kind of binder used for taking surveys or selling something. Happy Valentine’s Day! As I mentally kicked myself for opening the door, she launched into her spiel about not being there to raise money (oh yes, I’ve heard this before) while shoving a pile of cards in my regretful hands.

The cards contained pictures. Of children. In various countries around the world. The organization’s most ‘urgent’ cases. And before I could say ‘I thought you weren’t going to sell me anything’ I’d handed over a voided cheque and signed on to sponsor a child for a year.

Many minutes later, the driven representative saw herself out and left me and my insane sugar-laden zombies standing in the living room holding a picture of a nine year old girl. Jessica. From Ecuador. With beautiful brown eyes and a white hairband. She would be the quiet, well-behaved daughter-child I never had.

The Gort had come home after school and jenerously shared with his brothers all of the Valentine’s candy he’d received. An entire box of those conversation hearts? Mais oui! On top of the rice krispie treats they’d already enjoyed at a friend’s house. They’d played downstairs like animals, constructing a pillow fort (with my bed pillows); dumping a pack of 200 playing cards on the floor and Percy was running around in snowboots whilst wearing his older brother’s [upside down] sunglasses and all I could think was: this is my life?!

I needed to make dinner and I needed to harness the energy in the room. ‘Why don’t you write a letter to Jessica,’ I suggested to the Gort, figuring it was best to strike while the proverbial iron was hot. ‘You should probably write to her in Spanish,’ I added since she’s from Ecuador and since our Gort spends half of his school day learning Spanish. And also because I figured it would take longer for him to write a non-English letter. ‘But I can’t write that much,’ he balked and I told him to just write the basics: his name, his age, the names of his brothers, where he lives. Etcetera.

Minutes later, after filling two pages with pencil letters containing all the autobiographical details he could muster, he asked me to read what he’d wrote. When I arrived at ‘Yo me gusta el carne mucho,’ I nearly lost it.

Hey, Jessica from Ecuador, I like meat a lot. Just so you know. It’s integral to who I am as a person. Also, my favorite animal is a bull shark. [At least, I (Nicola) think that's what tiburon toro means.]

Priceless, really. And the Hen, not one to be left behind, got in on the action too. ‘How do you spell yogurt container?’ the four year old demanded-asked while I tried to summon the mental reserves to make some sort of beef-green bean stirfry. ‘Y-o [insert Percy running around with upside down sunglasses and the Gort asking me if I liked his drawing while I try to remember not to blanch the green beans for more than two minutes] g-u-r [insert cell phone ringing and the professor letting me know he's on his way home and the Hen asking me 'what comes after R'] t……

So tomorrow (or the day after, or the day after that), I will drop an envelope in the mail headed for Ecuador. Inside it will be white papers containing strange details about a random family in Canada. Along with a separate list of random words in English as recorded by a four year old: ‘water, food, sausages, and yogurt container.’ The essentials.

It’s a fairly accurate depiction of life chez nous.

The Bird

The baby of the house is nearly two and a half years old. He can be counted on for three things: talking like a four year old (‘anymore’ and ‘actually’ peppering most sentences), he purses his lips together like a bombshell-in-training, and he makes an enormous fuss every time he is strapped into his carseat.

Every.Time.

Most days we get in and out of the car at least twice. That’s a lot of buckling. And a lot of fussing. And a lot of me vowing not to leave the house ever again.

So, Sunday, quelle surprise, the professor straps the chocolate-eyed lad into his seat, and he immediately starts complaining. ‘There’s a bird in my back,’ he says. And, since there’s obviously not a bird in his back, we start playing the translation game. The ‘what is he actually saying‘ game. Even though it sounds exactly like ‘bird’.

‘Do you guys know what he’s talking about,’ we ask the older two, who can sometimes be counted upon to serve as their baby brother’s voice in times like these. ‘He’s saying bird,’ they both agree, in tones that suggest we parents are perhaps not as smart as we like to think.

‘Yes, but what does he mean?’ we try again. ‘He means bird,’ they insist.

Fine.

Unable to solve the ‘what does he mean by bird’ dilemma, we try another approach. We start asking if other, equally implausible objects are stuck in his back. A booger? A burger? Because isn’t that the game: announcing something completely ridiculous is stuck in your back?

‘Yeah,’ he agrees to whatever we ask and we conclude the kid is just looking for a new way to complain about his wretched carseat.

After the longest three minute drive ever, we pull into the driveway and the professor releases Percy from his Evenflo jail. In doing so he finds a black Playmobil raven stuck between the boy and his seat.

A bird. In his back.

Zombies and Netflix

On Sunday night, Percy and the Hen were hanging out in the little man’s crib. Not sleeping.

[The Hen]: You’re past one, and I’m past one and Gaga’s past one. You’re almost 3 and I’m almost 5 and Gaga’s almost 8. There are white zombies and grey zombies……….you don’t want to see the pink zombies….you know why? They throw strawberries!

[Percy]: I can’t see!
[The Hen]: Percy, listen!
[The Hen]: Percy, take the dummy [pacifier] out!
[Percy]:  I want to brush my teeth.
[The Hen]: Okay, I’ll brush your teeth…….Oww, you bite my finger!
[Percy]: Brush my teeth!
[The Hen]: No, you’re going to bite my finger.
[Percy]: [Possibly gnawing on the Hen's finger?] Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow
[The Hen]: Fine, no presents…Listen, if you bite my finger, do you know what will happen? My finger will bleed. So don’t bite my finger. If you bite your own finger, it will bleed too.  Zombies eat poop. Zombies like poop and dirty clothes. They like pee and farts. They eat poop. Is that funny?
[Percy]: Yeah
[The Hen]: Cuz zombies eat the stuff that we poop and pee and fart
[Percy]: I’m brushing my teeth
[The Hen]: I’ll show ya how you brush your teeth. I’ll show you. Percy, watch! And then you spit like this. [Spit sounds] and you wipe it off. And then you do this [Rinsing/swirling sound] And then you do it again. Where’s your dummy?
[Percy]: It’s right here.
[The Hen]: And then you do this. And then you do this. [Mutual laughter]
[Percy]: I have no covers!
[The Hen]: The zombies…the pink one is throwing strawberries at our window. But all our windows are strong. So then the zombies decide to break it.
[Percy]: There’s no zombies in here
[The Hen]: If you throw zombies really hard….
[Percy]: Go your window, go your window….I have no covers…..you sleep in covers?
[The Hen]: You mean zombies? The end.
[Percy]: The end
[The Hen]: I’m scared
[Percy]: There’s no zombies in here

The Hen suddenly climbs out of the crib and finds me in the hallway. Where I’m sitting with a laptop on my lap, eavesdropping. I send him back to his own bed. 

[The Hen yells to where I'm sitting in the hallway]: Mom did you know there’s such a thing as pink zombies?
[Moi]: Where did you hear that?
[The Hen]: It’s just a story I made up
[Moi]: And what happens when they throw strawberries at the windows?
[The Hen]: They break the windows and the grey and white zombies get in
[Percy]: Henners not sleeping with me
[The Hen]: No cuz I was only snuggling in there for a little bit. Mom, why is there Netflix on your computer?
[Moi]: Because Daddy’s watching [some awful] movie [called the Cube]
[The Hen, mumbling to Percy]: I wish mommy would let me watch a movie…..

Zumba and Pierogies: A Canadian Education

Perhaps, if you’re of the survey-loving variety, you’ve come across those pesky reports ranking countries around the world according to their student test results in reading, math and science. 

[Err, maths?]

I can’t say I’ve given these reports as much attention as, say, the news on celebrity-babies dot com, but I have occasionally glanced at them just to make sure the country-of-interest (Canada, the US, or – back in the day – South Africa) is somewhere in the top half of the results.

As luck would have it, Canada tends to rank highly. Which is nice. It makes me feel like I can send my kid off to school and not worry too much about what he may or may not be learning. Like when my mom asked me something about the Gort’s use of computers at school, I had no idea.

Because Canada’s in the top – whatever they’re learning, it’s bound to be better than what his counterparts in other countries are learning.

But occasionally, ‘whatever he learns at school’ intersects with our home life. And the Gort comes home and says things like, ‘have you ever had a pierogy?’ And I look at him and say ‘why?’

And then he tells me things like, ‘because we learned about pierogies…in social studies today.’ And I think back to the time I went to the Heritage Bakery on 37th Street (looking for polish candy, admittedly) and bought some pierogies and made them and none of my boy-children ate them.

‘What do you know about pierogies,’ I test his newfound knowledge and he explains about the dough filled with fruit [or other stuff]. And I carpe the moment and drive the four of us back to the same Heritage Bakery for a pack of fresh cheese and potato pierogies and a pack of frozen blueberry pierogies.

I pay $15 for the pierogies and we go home and I pan-fry the potato-cheese ones and boil the blueberry [frozen] ones. And I toss them on a plate and call it dinner?

I take a bite of the blueberry pierogy and try to decide if it is, in fact, one of the vilest things I’ve ever tasted. Four slightly chilled blueberries encased in a slimy dough wrapper. Yes, it is. Vile.

‘These are delicious!’ the Gort insists and I think two things. One, children have no clue what good food tastes like and (2) I bet he’ll change his tune after two bites.

Sure enough, minutes later, he modifies his original verdict: ‘Actually, I only like the blueberries, I don’t like this’ and he points to the slimy dough wrapper.

In addition to the pierogies unit in social studies class, the Gort also had an opportunity to participate in a ‘Zumba residency’ last week. Perhaps I’m the only person alive who still doesn’t know what Zumba is, but when I saw the note in his school-issued agenda, I wondered: ‘Isn’t Zumba something for the err, older set?’

No matter, on the final day of the residency, we parents were invited to sit on the stage in the crazy-hot gym and observe the room full of seven year olds doing their best to keep up with the Zumba instructor. Who instructed…en espanol.

All four of us attended the Gort’s Zumba debut, which was – perhaps – overkill considering the informal nature of it all. (Meaning, there were 20 seats and we occupied four of them.)The professor and I smiled at the display of un-coordination before us. ‘He’s got his dad’s dancing ability,’ my better half shook his head; remembering his youth and the awkward nanoseconds he spent on the dance floor.

To be fair, it might be the age, as most of the kids had arms and legs going in opposite directions; barely resembling the moves their instructor demonstrated. But there was no denying they were having fun.

Later that evening, I played one of the songs from the instructor’s playlist. The Gort ran out of his room and together we busted a few Zumba ‘moves’ in the kitchen.

I’m guessing it was one of those moments that felt better than it looked.