These are a few of my favorite things

[Professorial gifts from New York City. Circa October 2011.]

Adieu, Calgary….

….it’s that time of year, again. I shall miss your beauty. But not your mosquitoes. Though I’m sure the American ones are just waiting to sink their teeth into my pale, parched skin.

Summer’s coming

‘Mom, what’s your favorite thing about summer,’ the Gort asked me last week. ‘Being outside, going for walks,’ I replied. Because it’s true and because I couldn’t think of anything more snappy to say. ‘What’s your favorite thing about summer,’ I asked, expecting him to say something like ‘no school’. ‘Ice cream,’ he replied. Definitively.

And so we found ourselves, at the start of the ‘May Long [weekend]‘, heading to Fish Creek Park for the first time in several months. We unloaded bikes. The Gort sped ahead – on his training wheels – while we adults took turns pushing the stroller and bringing up the rear with the red-helmet-wearing Hen. Who screeches to a halt – by dragging his feet along the asphalt – whenever he senses a teensy bit of [downward or upward] slope in the trail.

This proved to be particularly problematic when done on an incline. Because a bike starts moving backward fairly quickly, he discovered, more than once, as he veered, back-first, into the grassy area surrounding the trail. Surprisingly untroubled by the danger of it all.

‘You’re going to break your ankles,’ the professor warned, shaking his head in disbelief. As I grabbed onto the little man’s handlebars to steer him upwards or downwards. Reminding him to use the pedals to stop the bike instead of his Crocs.

It was a painful process, this shepherding a three and a half year old on a bike. Not least because the mosquitoes were out…for blood.

Our modest one-mile-ish loop…took an hour and a half.

That’s a lot of mosquitoes. Not my favorite part about summer.

Adieu, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen

It was as if God Himself had read my pitiful blog last night, because when I woke up this morning there was sunshine. (And 18 degrees Fahrenheit, but let’s focus on the positive.) After a celebratory latte, I decided some spring cleaning would be in order.

I rid our coat closet of snow pants and snowsuits. And replaced them with raincoats and lighter, spring jackets. Maybe said jackets will be worn along with wool sweaters, but I have to draw the line somewhere. And I hereby declare April 18th the end of winter. Also, speaking of drawing lines, I parted ways this weekend with one of my steadfast, wintry friends: sticky toffee pudding

Such a momentous occasion calls for another excellent ode by moi:

Rich companion

Delicious friend

You’ve kept me company to winter’s end (ish)

My pants don’t fit

And I have rolls

So we must part ways

(Until it snows…….again)

Yes, that is the baby’s fingerprint in my whipped cream

Spring Break in Narnia

Good morning!

Today marks the first day of the ten-days-of-unending-bliss known as Spring Break. This year, the professor and I discussed – at great length – just where we should spend our not-quite-Spring holiday. The Dominican Republic? Costa Rica? Belize? Mexico?

We settled on Narnia instead.

Why opt for sandy beaches, clear water and sunshine….when we could have ‘freezing fog’ and ’26 degrees Fahrenheit’ and a snowy-icy landscape…all in one?

It was an obvious choice, at least for us.

Because magical things happen in Narnia, that don’t happen in other more [conventionally] exotic locales.

Here, small mythical creatures (aka boys) roam about, tangled in pieces of furniture. As though imagining their future days in nursing homes. While others walk around with Superhero DVD’s, begging to watch them from the minute they wake up. If you – the parent – say something reasonable like ‘you can watch it when your baby brother takes a nap’ the boy will proceed to ask, every five minutes, ‘is Percy tired?’ ‘Is it time for Percy’s nap?’

Even though it’s 10 o’clock. In the morning.

And ‘the baby’ doesn’t usually nap until noon. Two hours. Divided by five minute intervals. Equals: a lot of ‘is Percy tired yet’.

Narnia is also replete with boys walking around complaining ‘my finger smells like poop’; eager to demonstrate to you that their appendage does, in fact, smell like fecal matter. And no amount of protesting or evil eye can convince them to keep their fingers to themselves; that this is, in fact, one time you will take their word for it.

‘You need to wash your hands with soap and water,’ you might suggest. Reasonably. ‘I’ve already done that,’ the complainant will likely disagree.

What do you say to that? Besides ‘two-hundred-and-thirty-seven-more-hours’……

The Spring Slump

A friend sent me an email asking if the Gort’s Spring Break had started yet. It occurred to me, for the first time in three winters, that ‘Spring’ Break is a bit of a misnomer in Canadaland. Yes, the official day of Spring is March 20. But it’s been snowing all week. And the crocuses and daffodils my Facebook friends are boasting about, will not see the light of day here until perhaps the end of April. Or beginning of May.

Maybe.

I drove the Gort to school early yesterday morning. Most of the time when I’m driving in the car, or looking outside, I can find something that I think is beautiful. The light. The sky. A tree. Something. But not yesterday. The sky was grey. And it was snowing. Again. Still. And all that lurked underneath the snow was more brown and grey.

I’ve entered a Spring slump, I had to concede. The calendar insists it’s Spring, but it’s not. There have been no fun outings. No pictures of ‘fun’ outings. I haven’t cooked anything delicious in years, nor made any delicious dessert. (Well, I did make sticky toffee pudding….and it was delish.) Even the blogging has been bad. Either I haven’t been around funny people, or I’ve forgotten what funny looks like. Maybe both. Either way, when I’m boring myself trying to record something entirely inconsequential, there’s a pretty good chance it will be boring to others as well.

I watched ‘Date Night’ last Friday night. Sans date. Which felt a little bit sad. Coupled with the fact that I was laughing uproariously during the opening scene when the kids jump on the parents. And wake them up, demanding breakfast. And it’s barely 5am. I was sitting at home – alone – watching a movie that had received lukewarm reviews, and laughing as though it were the funniest thing I’d ever seen.

Somebody release me from the clutches of this seasonal malaise! And it’s not just me. Friends are similarly ‘enchanted’. I actually found a cooking blog (ironically, belonging to a woman from the Calgary-area) and one of her posts featured ‘Winter Sucks’ cookies.

I highly doubt icing that motto on baked goods will help me feel better about the here and now. So, how else am I to escape this Spring slump, save a month-long beach holiday in some exotic locale?

Fake it.

Leek, butternut squash and potato soup. And kale chips. It’s like sunshine and green grass. Except not.

February

Goodbye February

the shortest-longest month of the year

28 days

of cold,

snot-cough quarantine, teeth explosions, little sleep

and no basement;

hunkering down with my three boy-children

in two hundred square feet of living space

you had your lovely moments too, don’t get me wrong,

mostly food-related

hence

my pants don’t fit anymore

ergo I will start March on a diet

the ‘no-dessert-for-a-week’ diet

[books will be out in the store, soon, order now at a discounted price of $19.99]

really, it should be the ‘no-dessert-for-a-month’ diet

but I know myself

well

I’ll be lucky if I make it a week

hence the public proclamation

[five] readers of this blog, take note

I am going on a sugar strike

starting at midnight….because the professor just made chocolate chip cookies…

Blue skies

‘It’s going to be plus six today,’ the professor alerted me earlier this morning. ‘That’s like forty degrees,’ he translated for our collective benefit. Forty degrees! That’s positively tropical. I hatched a tentative plan to take my blondies on some sort of outing after school.

When I looked out the window later in the morning, I noticed the sky was bright blue. Not the lovely-but-face-searing-cold blue it had been earlier in the week. Bonafide, decent-weather-blue. Am I strange for feeling instantly happier by simply looking at a cloudless blue sky?

I loaded the littlest boy-children in the van for the daily post-school pick up. The Gort ran towards me while clutching the waistband of his pants with one hand. ‘You’re wearing your brother’s pants,’ I observed-chided. ‘I know, they keep falling down…it’s embarassing!’ We walked together to the van where his brothers were waiting. ‘I’m starving!’ he announced-blamed, ‘I only had two things for lunch.’ ‘Well, why didn’t you tell Daddy you wanted three things?’ I asked the obvious question.

I made a mental note to tell the professor to put more food in the Scooby Do lunchbox, and to order a wardrobe change when our children wear pants that are three inches too short.

I stopped at Mac’s and bought a small bag of white cheddar cheese popcorn to help curb the Gort’s hunger. And I adjusted the elastic waistband in his pants so they’d stay on-ish. And then we drove to Edworthy Park. Because I couldn’t let the first outdoor excursion of 2011 be ruined by a hungry belly and a pair of ill-fitting jeans.

So we went, we saw, we walked. And we also froze a little bit because ‘someone’ consistently fails to remember that it’s at least three degrees colder and windier by the river.

The older boys ran around. The baby pushed a stubborn stroller along a snow-covered path. And I stared at the sky.

January

31 snowy days….gone

Tired of Grey