A boy named Jose

The wide world of multiple-kid sports opened its all consuming doors to us this year.

After a vaguely pyramid-scheme-ish dalliance with karate and its monthly payments and timed progression of colored belts, we convinced the Gort to pass on the kata and give indoor soccer a try.

And the Hen, having declared his intent to join the NBA right out of high school – oh is my father not quite six feet tall, I hadn’t noticed – launched his basketball career right here in Calgary.

Thus we hopped aboard the practice-game-conditioning train a deux, turning most Saturdays into a basketball-soccer-Costco triune along with the rest of middle-aged North America. I mean, nothing says ‘This is 40 (or 50!)’ quite like huddling on metal bleachers with a Tim Horton’s cup in hand while yelling at cheering on a posse of uniformed young people.

(I, of course, do not have a Tim Horton’s cup in my hand, because eight years of Canadian living has not been sufficient to convince me of its merits.)

Perhaps you are wondering ‘don’t you have a third child? Why are you only talking about sports for two children? I mean my kids are in two sports – each!’

To which I reply: yes, the kid with the chocolate eyes that could convince even the most hardened individual that lying and stealing are adorable pastimes, is still kicking around here somewhere. He was not given the option of extracurricular activities other than lunch-time choir at his school because three kids! two parents with weird hours! scheduling nightmare!

He can launch his NBA career when the Gort starts to drive. Or he’s good enough to play on the Hen’s team. Until then he will have to watch NBA League and learn through osmosis.

But back to Saturdays. And the bleachers.

Due to opposing soccer-basketball schedules and volunteer commitments, I had not been a regular fixture at the boys’ games until January came along. Then the calendrical stars aligned and I found myself sitting on the sidelines, with a less than enthused Percy, eager to cheer my boys’ teams on to victory. Because I have this innate inability to watch a game without words coming out of my mouth in a loud manner.

As with the Tim Horton’s cups, it is yet another thing that sets me apart from most Canadian parents – an observation I first made in outdoor soccer, when I realized I was one of the only parents ‘cheering’ for the huddle of moving uniforms. Everyone else sat, silently watching, tapping on their phones, talking to their neighbors. And then there was me, convinced I could alter the game’s outcome by exhorting the players to kick, shoot, whatever.

I also am not content to just yell, anonymously, to whoever has the ball – I value knowing the players’ names; being able to personalize my exhortations. This, of course, is easier to achieve when you attend all the games. You get a sense of which parents belong to which player and, if the parent occasionally cheers for their own child, you learn the names of the kids. In lieu of all this hearsay and sideline detective work, one could, of course, consult TeamSnap for a list of the players’ names and go from there.

However, three-kids-in-two-schools, two-kids-in-two-sports Nicola has decided to simplify things this year by not reading any [non-personal] emails. A revolutionary concept, to be sure, and one that undoubtedly has me on the parent-blacklist at school(s) but between the schools, the sports, the library and the orthodontist I get an average of 20 emails/notifications every day. 

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Thus I showed up in school gyms and soccer centres in January and put my increasingly less keen sense of observation to work learning people’s names. The Hen’s basketball team wasn’t too bad – I already knew the names of some of the players and eventually figured out the rest – except for a trio of boys known as Michael-Seth-Will. Though they did not look particularly alike, something about them prevented me from identifying them by their correct name. Thus I spent the first half of a game cheering for ‘Will’ while sitting next to his dad. Only to deduce from another spectator that Will was, in fact, Michael.

(Something I could have avoided if Michael’s reticent dad had been cheering for his son!)

Learning the players’ names of the Gort’s soccer team proved a lot more difficult, mostly due to fluctuating attendance and it being a larger group of boys. I took my cues from the few parents cheering – somewhat despondently  – for their perpetually losing sons.

Fortunately I had help from Jose’s dad. A tall man, with a booming voice, determined to yell his son’s team to victory. Because nothing else seemed to work. ‘Go Jose!’ he called every time his son rotated into play – usually to relieve a gasping, waterlogged Gort – who has not yet figured out that drinking two liters of water during a soccer game is not conducive to running after a ball. ‘Go Brady! Go Garrett! Go Eric!’ the man cheered tirelessly, eliciting similar efforts from other parents.

‘Go Jose!’ I started cheering too. ‘Go Garrett! Go Eric!’ The interesting thing about Jose and his father is that neither appeared to be of Hispanic descent. If anything they appeared to have Middle Eastern roots. ‘It seems odd they would name their kid Jose,’ the professor and I mused aloud at one point, but who were we to say anything. We, the parents of an overly hydrated child with a Croatian name despite the fact I could not identify the Adriatic Sea on a map.

The other interesting thing I noticed in subsequent games was that other parents appeared to call Jose ‘Zay’ as in ‘Go Zay!’ This struck a nerve with my overly formal, shortened-name-hating self. As I find it difficult to call people I know well by anything other than their full first names, I could not fathom shortening Jose’s name to Zay for cheering purposes.

Naturally, I kept yelling ‘Go Jose!’

One evening while sitting at my computer doing a bit of work, an email from TeamSnap popped into my inbox and I clicked on it, since I was already adding things to the calendar. The email showed a list of players available for the upcoming practice, with Jose being conspicuously absent from the list. The list did, however, include a boy named Zain, whose name I didn’t recognize from any of the previous games.

Or did I?

With my stomach churning at the prospect of complete and total humiliation, I consulted the team roster. Just to see if anybody, anywhere on that team claimed the name Jose.

No.

Just Zain.

Go Zay…n!

Signs and metaphors

The night before we were due to leave Oregon, it was decided that we would gather on the beach one last time, to roast hot dogs and marshmallows and watch the sunset.

Memory making. On crack.

We were down two adults, so I found myself cooking potatoes, trying to pack up our belongings to ensure a somewhat smooth, less-than-three-hours-long exit the next morning and wrangling 5 children in various states of hunger-fuelled insanity, while the professor sat on the beach trying to get a fire going. (Toute seule, it needs to be said.)

It was my own real-life version of Whac-A-Mole – run upstairs to pack, run downstairs to corral impatient children heading to the beach unsupervised, check the potatoes, run upstairs to pack, run to the third floor to address 5 children pouncing on the pulled out sofa bed screaming ‘NO MORE MONKEYS JUMPING ON THE BED’, run back to packing, check potatoes, retrieve yet another errant child on the way to the beach.

Finally, everything was more or less ready and I ordered everyone to use.the.bathroom because there had been a few abrupt beach-departures throughout the week to accommodate someone who suddenly needed to pee, etc.

I escorted the troops down the 83 stairs to the sand where the professor tended his fire. Then I walked back up the 83 stairs to retrieve the stuff I hadn’t been able to carry. Back down the stairs. Back up the stairs. Back down the stairs and wouldn’t you know it, a child suddenly had to go to the bathroom.

If only I were exaggerating.

While I ‘worked out’, a chair caught fire, and the sand latched on to everything like a disease. There was sand in the hot dogs, the buns, even the ketchup. I bit into a smore and the graham cracker seemed crunchier and more resilient than I remembered.

I watched my brother-in-law throw a football to the Hen, and I couldn’t help but feel we were in the middle of a Fourth of July photo shoot (albeit the satire version). That the Hen missed the football tossed in his direction seemed a fitting metaphor for the evening.

The next morning, after a mere two-hour exit process courtesy of the previous night’s preparations, we bid Lincoln City adieu and headed back to Seattle. We stopped in Portland for one more round of donuts, this time at Blue Star. It was the kind of place that had a gynormous line snaking all the way to the entrance, with all manner of people clamoring to drop $3.50 on a piece of fried dough.

One bite into the Old-Fashioned rendered the professor a fan and I was more than pleased with my de rigueur apple fritter. My sister tried the blueberry bourbon basil donut which had the most beautiful purpley glaze. It was also extremely basil-y which is slightly disconcerting when paired with fried dough.

With just about one hour before we had to get back in the car, we did a quick walkabout of Portland, stopping at Powell’s Books and Stumptown Coffee and Lardo for sandwiches for the road. Just before we hit the road again, I stopped at Blue Star once more to get the professor another Old-Fashioned, in lieu of an 18th anniversary gift. The couple ahead of me was mulling over the selection, considering the purple basil donut. I thought about telling them about our basil-donut experience, but thought better of it – not wanting to be the weird person in line who offers her unsolicited opinion.

Good thing, because as it turns out the purple basil donut is their signature offering. Apparently people – at least in Portland – want their donuts to taste of green herbs. It reminded me of my experiment with chicken lemonade.

After dropping off my mom at the SeaTac airport, we made our way to a friend’s house. Despite their being out of town, she’d offered to let us crash at their place for a few nights, which will surely go down in history as one of the nicest things, ever. Unfortunately the Johnsons are still living in the 90s, traveling with neither GPS nor a phone with a U.S. Data plan. All we had were the hastily written down (on paper) directions I’d retrieved from Google Maps the night before.

Which is how we found ourselves stopped on a road with the instruction to ‘turn right’ onto a nonexistent road. Three miles from where we needed to be, as it turns out. It was a sign of how we’d spend most of our time driving around Seattle – staring at tourist maps marked with all the Top Pot and Cupcake Royale locations in the city, but offering precious little information on  ways to successfully get onto Highway 99, so you can find that bleeping Bridge Troll.

 

All while a homeless man walked past the van, unleashing a torrent of expletives aimed at a Mercedes that had passed him three minutes before. We sat, stunned, as the extremely disgruntled gentleman constructed (loud!) sentences using every curse word the dictionary has ever seen.

I feared rolling up the windows might catch his attention and incite further rage, so we sat quietly, waiting for his words to fade into the distance.

Our main reason for spending a few extra days in Seattle was to go to a Mariner’s game. All summer long the Hen had begged to go to a game and his baseball-loving father was only too happy to oblige. So on the 18th anniversary of our wedding day, in the city where we’d spent a bit of our honeymoon, we entered Safeco field with our 3 boy-wonders. Along with an enormous bag of kettle corn which I’d bought as my own anniversary gift slash consolation prize. Because I wouldn’t describe myself as a fan of America’s favorite pastime.

The Hen had also dreamed about running the bases after the game, like he and his cousins did last summer after a Tin Caps’ game. As luck would have it, on this particular day, kids were allowed to run the bases after the game. Less lucky was the game going into extra innings. Which means my genius plan of queuing after the 7th inning, in order to ‘beat the crowd’, translated into standing in line for an hour and a half while the crowd watched 4 more innings of baseball.

Sometimes the early bird has to wait for the worm.

‘Tis the season to be….watching soccer

It’s the last week of April (err, beginning of May) in Calgary and that can only mean one thing: outdoor soccer season.

With four days of soccer-fun under our familial belt, I can safely say: 1 car, 2 adults, 3 kids in soccer, 4 days of every week…. is not an ideal combination. At least, not for the Johnsons, who pride themselves on their less is less attitude towards the extracurricular enhancement of their wonderboys.

But it’s a short season, the older boys insisted they wanted to play and I’m pretty sure Percy dressed in cleats and shin guards is possibly one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen. Which means, for 2014, we are the proud owners of one U10 player, one U8 player and a U6 player.

In honor of the madness, I’ve created ‘the soccer door’. Commandeering an over-the-door shoe organizer (purchased from Target in 2005) and using it as a hold-all for the boys’ shorts, socks, cleats, and shirts. I rarely rise to the (organizational) occasion, but I have to admit this is genius. Much like when I stuffed my family’s clothes in plastic bags last summer.

Of course, the only ‘catch’ is you have to wash laundry and put it away. Otherwise you have an empty organizer and people wearing shorts that are 2 sizes too small or kvetching about how they can’t find any [blank].

The professor and I were talking last week about the logistical nightmare that is the next 6 weeks. ‘What if we put Percy on the Hen’s team,’ I suggested. Since the coach of our middle boy’s (rather unfortunate) golden-rod-colored U8 team is none other than the professor.

‘He should be fine,’ we opined about our 4 year old’s futbol ability, ‘he seems to hold his own against his brothers.’

Because we play backyard soccer (sometimes) on a 9 x 12 patch of grass with all three boys and we have vague recollections of Percy tending goal, or at least yelling loudly when someone takes the ball away from him.

Having equated vociferousness with semi-skill, we tentatively settled on this idea of moving young Percy over to the U8 team, which would only wreak havoc with our Tuesdays and Thursdays. And then…..we watched him on the soccer field with non-siblings; kicking the ball in random directions, wandering off the field to check out the shrubs, standing on grates instead of getting in the game. Continuously summoned by his coach ‘Hey, Piers, buddy!’ ‘Come on, Piers, buddy…’ ‘Over here….buddy!’

Our ‘Tuesday-Thursday’, ‘two-brothers-on-the-same-team’ dream died on the spot. ‘Hopefully this isn’t a sign of the Kindergarten report cards to come next year,’ the professor mumbled nervously.

As I discovered last year when I helped coach the Hen’s team, U6 soccer is akin to herding cats. Save the odd superstar, or determined player, you’re trying to teach 4 and 5 year olds with very limited, or should I say ‘selective’, focusing ability about ball handling and passing and not standing in the goal! It’s much like pouring sand through a sieve.

They run off the field whenever they want to, regardless of what’s happening in the game. ‘I’m tired!’ or ‘I’m thirsty’ they mutter without so much as a backwards glance at the so-called teammates they’re leaving in the lurch. And their understanding of the drills demonstrated to them is reduced to a vague memory about having to high-five someone at the end of doing….something.

On Monday, we eagerly stood on the sidelines and watched our mini-David-Beckham-but with-short-term-memory-loss play against a trio of girls in pale yellow shirts. A trio of very determined girls who, aided by the downward slope towards their goal, managed to clobber the three ‘black bears’ 10-2.

At least.

On Wednesday, the black bears played against a pale blue team whose coach insisted the 4 and 5 year olds abide by all soccer rules. Meaning every time the ball went out of bounds (which, in a game with players of that demographic, happens about every 1.3 seconds) there was a painfully long pause as they determined which player would throw the ball back in and waited for said player to hurl said ball over his (or her) head, two feet short of the mini-crowd of people standing in front of him.

Not that any of them were looking, or ready to receive the ball, mind you.

 

The (W)NBA

This year, the Johnsons reluctantly accepted membership into that crazy club: parents with children in extracurricular activities. Oh sure, most parents accepted membership into the club when their child(ren) turned two, beginning with story times or tumbling classes which morphed into karate or dance classes, which morphed into soccer, hockey, and swimming.

All while we sat, idly, by. At home. Ruining any chance our child(ren) had at getting into Harvard or becoming MacArthur Fellows or (notreallyatall) getting to the outer reaches of some sport’s minor, minor league.

But this year, with the Gort in grade 4, I concluded it was time for him to do something. To try out a sport. (Besides May and June’s outdoor soccer.)

Taking into account the boy’s lack of interest, the professor’s concern with head injuries, the various sports’ time commitments and my unwillingness to watch most sports, I settled on basketball. It seemed a good sport for refining gross motor skills, getting some exercise and encouraging social interaction with peers. (Though, I suppose, all sports fit that particular bill.) Also it’s pretty much the only sport I will watch.

So the Gort joined a local basketball club.

The season began with four sessions of evaluations for all grade 4-6 players. The professor took him to one of the sessions and observed the gym full of mostly 9 and 10 year olds. ‘The Indiana part of me just died,’ he sighed when he got home that night. Having attended the first two sessions, I knew exactly what he meant – walking into an elementary basketball gym in Canada is akin to walking into a hockey rink in Indiana (assuming you could find one): you’re watching fish out of water, basically.

The double dribbling. The travelling. The shooting. Oh my.

Evaluations gave way to weekly team practices which paved the way for Saturday games. At the first game, I chuckled as I watched boys, surrounded by eager defendants, try to escape the crowd by walking backwards with the ball in their hands.

Other highlights included a kid dribbling intently towards the opposition’s goal while both coaches and referees yelled at him to ‘go the other way’ and balls passed at either the wrong team or, in many cases, to ‘the team mate who wasn’t there’. And the best one: child cowering with arms covering his head when the ball bounced back unexpectedly from the backboard.

Technical difficulties aside,  I found myself turning into that parent within three minutes of the first game. You know, the parent who shouts (‘encourages, loudly’) continuously from the sidelines, like it’s the NCAA Sweet Sixteen, despite the fact that no one else around me was doing anything more than clapping. Politely.

A few weeks after the Gort started playing basketball, a friend invited me to play basketball with some other women.

Basketball and I……have a bit of a history.

I’d spent my early years playing netball (which seems only to be played in the sunny southern hemisphere). I landed in an American gym class in junior high and learned we’d be playing basketball that day. I saw the ‘net’ and the ball and thought: ‘I got this.’ Until some girl named JennyJankovic aggressively ripped the ball out of my hands. My first thought was: Violation! My second thought was: apparently basketball and netball are different.

I never played again, my desire for personal space and order far exceeding my desire to dribble or shoot.

So, twentysome years later, when someone casually invited me to play basketball, my immediate reaction was to say ‘I don’t play basketball.’ But then…. I thought about the Gort and how I expect him to try stuff even if he doesn’t think he’ll be good at it….so I went.

I tried to warn my fellow players about my ridiculous ‘personal space bubble’ and how they weren’t allowed to invade it and they were all ‘you realize this is basketball’ and I was all ‘yes, that’s precisely why I don’t play the game.’

One woman (not on my team) who I’d never seen before, kept standing right by me and shoving me out of the way whenever the ball headed her way. I kept trying to figure out what I’d done to annoy her, because why else was she shoving (unsuspecting) me out of her way? Turns out that’s ‘part of the game.’ ‘She’s trying to bounce off you,’ someone explained. As if I was a trampoline.

At the end of the night, when I expressed my doubts about returning to the group, someone else said ‘you have to try it at least twice.’ So I did. I showed up for a second night which, as luck would have it, had half as many players. Which meant I spent less time freaking out about my personal space bubble and could try and play the game. Even if I kept missing baskets and failed to grasp offensive strategy.

I did discover that people got excited when you rebounded the ball so I tried to compensate for my lack of skill by trying to get the ball back whenever (remotely) possible. A little too enthusiastically, it seems, because – at the end of the game – I looked down at my left hand and noticed my pinkie finger had ballooned to twice its normal size.

And was turning blue.

I’m not really a roll-with-the-punches, shrug off an injury type of girl; which is probably another reason for avoiding contact sports all these years. I showed my very considerable, career-ending injury to another player. ‘Oh you jammed your finger,’ she nodded her head; having probably endured many a jammed finger in her life. I told another player about my balloon-finger. ‘Oh, you’ll just have to tape it next time you play,’ she suggested.

Tape? Next time?

The Caganer

It was Tuesday morning (a week ago). ‘Make sure you say goodbye to Dad before you go to school,’ I instructed our oldest boy-child, ‘because he’s going to be gone for a few days.’

‘Where’s he going,’ the Gort asked. And I had to chuckle at the evidence of the Johnson’s fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants approach to parenting. Apparently we hadn’t told the boys the professor was going away. To another continent.

‘Barcelona.’

‘Barfalona?!’

It seemed the Gort was somewhat familiar with the place, because he said ‘that’s where they have the poopers.’

And I had to wonder if I had heard him correctly: ‘the poopers?’

‘Yeah, Madame Matthews told us at Christmas they have these little figures that are pooping.’ I had to wonder how much of the real story had gotten lost in translation. Still, something about the way he’d explained it convinced me ‘the poopers‘ were real.

We dropped the professor off at the airport. ‘The Hen wants you to bring back a pooper,’ I texted after he let me know he’d checked in. ‘A what?’ he replied. ‘A pooper.’

A couple of days passed before I heard from him again. ‘I did see the pooping ornaments. I didn’t buy any, but if the boys really want one, I can.’

I responded in the affirmative, that yes, given all the hype surrounding the poopers, he really ought to bring one home; perhaps a superhero pooper.

The next thing I knew, our highly sleep deprived, jet-lagged paternus familias posted what is best described as a ‘classic professor’ rambling on his fantasy football league’s message board. Apparently the poopers had inspired his weekly pre-cap, which I’ve edited ‘slightly’ for  my punctuation-averse better half.

‘Well if you thought last week’s pre-cap was full of unintelligible jibberish, hold on to your pelotas. This week we join you from Barcelona. Why Barcelona you ask? Why not.

So each of these matchups will focus on the unexplained that we find here in this city of tici taca, paella and not so awesome coffee.

Somos v. Jack.

Well obviously Somos los Campeones is all you hear around here, albeit in Catalan and with lithping s’s ….

Somos by 50

[Did I mention I was 0-5 on these last week.]

Spanktra v. Buttbombs.

OK, for you Mr. Bombing Buttocks, I give you the Caganer. Yes, it’s a wonderful Barcelona tradition of placing a figurine in the corner of the nativity scene, “cagando” as it were. Yup, nothing says Christmas like a miniature Lionel Messi dropping the deuce behind one of the donkeys. Apparently this tradition is hundreds of years old. Think of it as the Betty White in a film, you just put her in the corner somewhere to add a little humor to the scene.

Bombs by 9

Calgary v. Butkus

The Cagatio is hidden in the woods. Children go find him and bring him back. They feed him, and he grows and then craps candles and christmas presents. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. But lest you are confused that the Cagatio might mean the dumping uncle, it does not. It is a log, Ren and stimpy style. This log has a face and is covered by a blanket. Parents will buy different sized logs so that they can fool their children into thinking that feeding A FREAKING LOG makes it grow and crap presents. And candles.

I am not sure what the obsession with scatophelia is here or why it is combined with Christmas, but there you have it. So next time you are worried that telling your kids lies about Santa might be undercutting your credibility, remember at least you aren’t trying to sell the idea of a crapping log with a Santa hat…..

Enjoy the week and remember, if you are looking for some way to mask those holiday farts, just install a Caganer in your manger scene and Cagatio under your tree and blameshift.

Five days after he left, the professor returned. With a Spiderman pooper in his carry-on.

Let the Christmas season begin

Bowling {Day 43}

We went bowling on Wednesday.

It was on my ‘list’ of things to do this summer.

The older boys were rather competitive; comparing scores after each frame. [It always surprises me that they’re so – overtly – competitive with each other. The professor tells me that’s just what boys are like.]

The game was a bit slooooow.

Because ‘someone’ insisted on rolling their tiny ball down the lane at a half-mile-per-hour pace.

That is, when he wasn’t rolling around said lane.

There’s no such thing as a free….camp {Day 13, 14, 15, and 16}

A local church kindly offers a four-day free soccer and basketball camp for children aged 6-12. Upon the recommendation of friends whose children participated last year, I signed up the two oldest Johnson boys for eight hours of fun away from home.

[Minor detail: the Hen is technically 4, but (a) the kid spends most days playing soccer with an eight year old and (b) he’ll be 5 at the end of next month and (c) I never have a third point, yet I always pretend I do.]

So, I figured he would be just fine playing soccer with a bunch of six-year-olds.

The Gort had been clamoring to try basketball. On his eighth birthday, he wrote out a few goals for the year and one of them was: try basketball. Four months later, voila: free basketball camp.

So we dropped off our boys on Tuesday morning and picked them up two hours later. ‘How was it?’ I asked my rather pale, sweaty red-faced eight year old. ‘It was awesome!’ he enthused. And I patted myself on the back because (a) perhaps he’d found his sports calling, (b) I’d expended zero dollars and (c) I never have a third point.

It was the pinnacle of our 13th day of summer, for after that everything went south. Far south.

We went to Costco, all five of us, because the cupboards were rather bare. Two of my boy-children were running through the store. One was rearranging the food displays (when he wasn’t trying to sit on them). It was somewhat horrific, and the professor – who already hates nothing more than going to Costco en famille– was ready to throttle all of us.

After the joy that was Costco we went to Sportchek. Because they’d charged the professor the wrong price for the Gort’s brand-new, training wheel-free bike. I decided to seize the opportunity to look at some shoes for our [average height] Larry-Bird-in-training. This, of course, raised the sensitive matter of the Gort’s refusal to learn to tie his own shoes.

Guess what, after size 3, it’s pretty difficult to find velcro sports shoes.

And it raised the other sensitive matter of the Hen’s deep displeasure when the Gort gets something and he does not. Even if he has ten pairs of shoes at his disposal and his brother has…..one.

This led to the Hen refusing to leave the shoe area when it was time to go home.

[Could someone enlighten me about a successful strategy for getting a displeased child to willingly leave a store without (a) pretending you’re leaving him behind, or (b) forcefully extricating him from the store while horrified young (non-parent) employees look on and contemplate phoning social services, or (c)……..]

We tried the pretending we’re leaving strategy. It backfired. The Hen wandered off into the recesses of the store alone and the standoff ended with horrified young employees looking on as I forcefully extricated him from Sportchek.

[It’s worth mentioning I’d also wanted to stop at the Superstore, but even I knew it was in our collective best interest to go home. Pronto.]

And then we got home and, many minutes later, someone knocked on the open front door. A young boy-man whose name escapes me now. Not there to sell me anything, of course. Thirty dollars later, I’d signed up for a three month subscription of the Calgary Sun.

Which, I’m pretty sure, is akin to the National Enquirer.

‘What was that about,’ the professor asked from his temporary asylum on the couch. ‘Did you give that kid money?’ he inferred from my awkward silence. ‘For a paper that we’ll never read?!’ he practically fainted.

[I didn’t bother mentioning it was for the Calgary Sun, not the Herald which somewhat resembles an actual newspaper.]

Once the salesman was out of our crescent, I made a sign for the mailbox by the door: Absolutely NO SOLICITING. For people incapable of saying ‘no’.

More long minutes passed and as we attempted to herd the cats into their respective bedrooms for the night, the professor discovered a clump of freshly-squeezed blue paint on the hardwood floor.

‘Someone’ had purposely squirted fabric paint onto the floor?! While cleaning up the paint, the professor also noticed ‘someone else’ had jumped on the large tupperware containers in the closet and broken one.

At this point the man – who grew up with two brothers and seems to have amnesia about any of the mayhem they might have caused – was ready to ship the boys to an island far, far away.

‘So, can I ride my bike in the alley now,’ one of the trespassers asked.

The professor’s eyes nearly bugged out of his head. And the trespasser wisely opted to go to bed, instead.

Once the boys were in their respective beds, I decided to venture to the Superstore on my own. I was still wearing the dirt-laden shorts I’d donned for my morning jog and decided it was (finally) time for a change. I grabbed a pair of baggy light-blue jeans from my drawer and stepped into them.

The jeans – once so loose I had to wear a belt just to keep them at a respectable level – were suddenly tight and virtually unzippable.

Had I gained the equivalent of ten pounds in less than a week?

Surely. Not?

And then I put two and two together. The professor had been doing the bulk of the laundry lately – even though I’ve expressly banned him from laundering my clothes. He must have dried the pants on an insanely high setting; causing them to cling to my legs like shrink-wrap?

Once I’d expended the better part of five minutes putting on the jeans, I wasn’t about to take them off. Probably couldn’t, really. So I went to the library and the Superstore, hyper-conscious of the fact that I was wearing the world’s tightest jeans.

As I pushed my cart up and down the aisles, I fumed at the absent professor for ruining my jeans. Whilst trying to assure my panicky self that I couldn’t possibly have gained that much weight in a week.

When I got home and extricated my legs from their denim clutches, I looked at the tag.

It wasn’t the baggy pair of jeans I’d worn the week before.

It was an old pair I haven’t been able to wear since Percy was born – nearly three years ago – but keep around, ‘just in case’.

Put another one on the big board

A couple of months ago the Gort was talking about school – specifically getting to school [on time?] ‘Maybe I could ride my bike to school one day,’ he mused. And seeing as we’re living within walking distance from said school, this probably sounds like a perfectly reasonable request. The kind of request to which most parents would respond ‘that’s a great idea!’

Not moi.

I thought about it for a second or two. There are two schools of thought on how parents should respond when their children have questionable ideas: (1) Let them pursue their bad idea and  find out for themselves whether it was worth doing, (2) Do everything in your power to keep them from making fools of themselves.

For example, if the Gort had announced he wanted to wear nailpolish to school, some free-thinking parents would say let him wear the nailpolish even if his classmates might make fun of him and other more controlling types would say don’t let him wear the nailpolish, he’ll be teased.

I like to think I’m a little laissez-faire when it comes to certain unconventionalities, i.e. the Gort’s clothing choices. After all, I did let the kid wear a lifejacket to a public function once. And I do let him go to school every day wearing bizarre combinations of stripes and colors.

But a bike? To school?

‘Yeah, I can’t let you do that,’ I began, ‘trust me, you do not want to take a bike with training wheels to school when you’re in the second grade,’ I spelled it out for him.

Because yes, our darling boy at the tender age of 8, was still riding around on a [too small] bike….with training wheels. In his defense, his parents are somewhat to blame. We never did sign him up for a week of Pedalheads Camp where they all but guarantee your child will ride sans training wheels. And we didn’t do the ‘hold-on-to-the-back-of-a-bike-and-run-along-the sidewalk-until-the-kid-can-ride’ thing, either. And the boy never expressed more than a passing interest in moving beyond the four-wheeled stage, either.

We were slackers, all of us.

So our blond wonder took it upon himself to master the art of riding a two-wheeled bike. For the past week or so, he’s been dragging an [even tinier] purple bike from the garage and ‘riding around’ on the grass in the backyard.

It’s a little bike some neighbors passed on to us, one that was never particularly popular due to its color and size and wonky tires, hence it sat in the garage without training wheels. Used by no one.

The Gort could easily sit on the bike and ‘walk’ it around the yard with his feet. Finally, when he felt more comfortable, he began to balance and pedal for small spurts of time. A nanosecond grew into a few seconds, which turned into riding in circles around the yard.

So today, at roughly 4.08pm, we Johnsons gathered in the alley behind our house to set our new rider free.

‘That was AWESOME!’ he announced after navigating the length of the alley a couple of times.

Indeed.