This was a big deal chez nous. Because the Johnson boys are not exactly daredevils. Not that standing on one’s sled and going down a hill is daredevilish, for most people, but around these parts it was the equivalent of bungee jumping. Two minutes later I was on the phone with the Canada Olympic Park, signing the Gort up for a snowboard lesson.

I’m not usually an on-the-ball type of mom. I mean, the Gort himself has been asking me to set up an eye appointment for him for nearly two years. But when I sense even a glimmer of interest in something from one of my Lego-loving boy-children, I have to carpe the moment. Before they can change their minds. And revert to being basement dwellers who spend all day staring at  pieces of colored plastic.

So the appointed day arrived for the Gort’s lesson and we ventured to the ‘C-O-P’ as the locals call it. It has not escaped my attention that we’ve lived in Calgary for over three years and never visited this winter sport paradise. We’re what you might call a family of nons. Non-skiers, non-snowboarders, non-skaters. It made no sense to go to the COP for any reason besides buying very expensive mittens.

[I can now check that off the bucket list as well.]

The Gort and a nine year old boy named Bailey disappeared with an Australian instructor named Ben, and the Hen and I huddled in the ‘school house’ trying to stay warm slash interested in the whole experience.

An hour and fifteen minutes later, we had a semi-snowboarder on our hands. A semi-enthusiastic, semi-snowboarder. It was what I like to call ‘the biggest sports success of 2011′.

And then it was January and I remembered that other parents tend to sign their kids up for ‘activities’ and, save the one snowboarding lesson, the Johnson boys hadn’t actually done anything since soccer….in June. I checked the city’s recreation website and quickly came to the realization that other parents had reached similar conclusions, but in a much more timely manner.

Rock climbing? Fully booked. Hip hop classes? Fully booked. Floor hockey? Fully booked. Skating? Fully booked.

My only option, it seemed, was to sign up my cherubs for some more snowboarding. And, while I was at it, I even signed up the professor, who’d been talking about trying snowboarding ever since we moved here.

The Hen had his first lesson today. Ever since I told him – at the beginning of January – that I’d signed him up for snowboarding, he’s talked of little else. He practically bounced with excitement the entire way there. And then, as I delivered him to an instructor named Martins, it dawned on me that I’d made a terrible mistake.

‘He has snowboarded before, yes?’ The instructor with the thick accent inquired. ‘No, he’s never snowboarded before.’ ‘Oh, well, if they can skate, that really helps’.

Um, yeah, he doesn’t skate either.

After giving the small group of 3-5 year old’s a chance to get used to the board, Martins dispatched them to the conveyor belt that would convey them up the bunny slope. Minor detail: the Hen couldn’t get over to the conveyor belt. Not at all. A female instructor with wild blond hair finally took pity on him and carried him over to the ‘magic carpet’.

So much for the fairytale ‘the second my feet touched the board, I knew I’d be a snowboarder’ ending, I sighed.

Less than an hour later, I had another semi-snowboarder on my hands. A super enthusiastic, semi-snowboarder, who went up and down the slopes for an hour and a half after his lesson. ‘I want to do this forever,’ he announced to his dad.

‘I’m sooooo good,’ he reported at the end of the night, confident that he would become his generation’s Shawn White.

And tomorrow night we’ll find out if our fearless leader is good enough to be Shawn White’s...father.

I can’t wait.

Or, if viewed another way: spending $9 more than you need to. Which is, in retrospect, how I should have viewed it. I should have said, ‘no, I don’t think two classes in desert-like temps are a good idea.’

Instead I found myself rolling up my [untrendy] mat, donning my [non Lululemon] black pants and t-shirt and filling my two water bottles; trying to psych myself up for 75 more minutes of exercise in what amounts to…Texas.

I holed up in the coffee shop two doors down with my equally excited friend, wondering if pre-hot yoga lattes were in our best interest.

‘Have you been looking forward to this?’ she asked. ‘No, I’ve been dreading it all week,’ I replied. ‘You?’ ‘Dreading it.’

We watched faithful regulars carry their mats under their arms, heading for class fifteen, twenty minutes….early. Not us, we sat in our seats, clutching our mugs until the last possible minute. As if we were trying to delay being shipped off to war. Which, come to think of it, Afghanistan is probably about as hot as that studio.

Three minutes before class began, we summoned our tattered collective courage, ejected ourselves from the coffee shop seats and headed next door. As soon as I entered the room, I wanted to leave. There was a reason I’d dreaded that second class all week: it’s hotter than Hades in there.

A different instructor was leading the class; reading from some prepared script about our energy and who knows what else while I lay on my back pretending I wasn’t about to suffocate.

Two minutes after class started, I had a couple of realizations: (1) I was not going to survive the class and (2) the heat felt worse than it did the previous week.

Apparently, the Thursday class was called Traditional Hot Yoga. The second class, unbeknownst to me, was called Baptiste Power Vinyasa which is just another way of saying ‘really hard yoga poses done very quickly so you feel like you’re going to fall over and die.’

Instead of breathing and relaxing and finding my whatever, all I could think was: when is this going to be over?!

While I was doing my best not to collapse in a sweaty heap, I looked around for kindred spirits – people who looked like they might pass out at any second. There were three or four women lying on their mats, not doing the poses. ‘They even look like they’re in shape,’ I thought to myself as I collapsed on my pink mat; burying my face in my towel, trying to summon the will to get up. Again.

Finally, the abs-of-steel instructor uttered those blessed words: ‘I’ll be right back with your lemongrass towels,’ and we were permitted to stop twisting ourselves into pretzel-like shapes. Two seconds after that wondrous icy towel was placed in my hand, it was no longer icy. It was hot. Because I was hot. My water bottle was hot. My mat was hot.

‘Feel free to stay as long as you need to,’ our fearless leader encouraged. Not me, I stumbled out of that sauna into the women’s room. [Just as soon as my legs would support me.] My friend greeted me with a stunned look, ‘they all say it was much hotter in there than normal,’ she conveyed the post-class consensus.

A sopping wet twentysomething, who I recognized from the previous class, agreed. ‘That was definitely hotter than normal.’ I asked how often she did yoga. ‘Well, I’m not working right now so I pretty much come every day.’ Oh. ‘But don’t come here hungover,’ she warned, ‘I did that once and I had to leave because I almost threw up.’

Noted.

I spent the rest of the day in a pathetic state, finally going to bed at 9.30pm. The professor shook his head at my pitiful state: ‘wow, that yoga really invigorated you.’ ‘Yeah,’ I groaned, imagining alternative slogans for the studio: ‘If you want to feel worse, more exhausted, than you currently do, try our ultra-hot yoga classes.’

You’ll spend the day alternately sweating and having chills. Your ankles will be wobbly as you scour the aisles of Community Natural looking for kombucha and find yourself having the following conversation:

[Wobbly mother of three] ‘Do you sell kombucha.’

[Pierced employee] ‘Yes, what kind are you looking for?’

[Mother] ‘Um, I don’t even know what it is. It’s really more of a joke-present for my friend.’

[Pierced employee not seeing the obvious humor of kombucha] ‘Well, we have the tea leaves here and there are prepared drinks in the coolers.’

So I purchased two ‘energy’ drinks. And when I got home, I shook my glass bottle of red liquid and poured some in a cup for myself and for each of the boys, who were just dying to try the ‘spicy’ drink. Suddenly I sensed the presence of something slimy in my mouth. I spit the strange-tasting beverage all over the kitchen countertops in full view of all my boy-children.

‘Did you just barf?’ the Gort asked, semi-astonished.

‘No, there was something slimy in there, it was disgusting,’ I replied. Unrestrained.

I read the label on the back of the bottle. ‘Do not shake’ it warned, without explanation.

The professor has a bit of a beef with me in this regard as he’s thrown out a fair amount of expired baby spinach, peppers and other moldy vegetables over the years. I buy them with the best of intentions, but somehow fail to cut them up or incorporate them in actual meals before they fall into a state of ‘that’s probably not a good idea’.

So it was Sunday and when I opened the (transparent) vegetable drawer in the refrigerator I found not one, but two heads of broccoli, one very large head of cauliflower and some less than perky carrots. I’d somehow forgotten about all of these in the course of a week?!

I considered throwing them in the garbage can – quietly. Because who could consume that many vegetables in one night? Then I thought about the $130. And I felt guilty. So I determined to make…something with said vegetables.

Roasted cauliflower. Broccoli Soup. Broccoli Slaw. Carrot-apple muffins.

I felt all kinds of virtuous until the clock struck 11 and I’d eaten nothing but roasted cauliflower. And my stomach wanted to disown me. And the equally afflicted professor wanted to disown me, vowing never to touch another piece of cauliflower in his life.

‘If I can go 10 years without eating dulce de leche [following some sort of incident] I think I can stay away from cauliflower,’ he assured me when I suggested he was being melodramatic.

The next night I attempted to serve the broccoli soup to the wonderboys. Along with grilled cheese sandwiches. Percy dipped a bite of his grilled cheese sandwich in the soup – as he always does when I make tomato soup. The look on his face was out of this world: surprise tinged with deep disgust. He nibbled his grilled cheese – only – for the rest of the meal. The Gort tasted a bite. ‘Well, what do you think?’ I asked. He stuck out his thumb, pointing it towards the tabletop. ‘It’s somewhere between bad and medium’ he explained, lest I tried to fool myself into thinking he’d meant ‘so-so’.

I tasted the soup. It wasn’t anything I cared to eat, ever again. Which begs the question: is it actually virtuous – making a disgusting soup that no one wants to eat, instead of simply tossing the main ingredient in the garbage?

[Side note: I rather like the broccoli slaw and have been nibbling on it these last two days. I only used 1tbsp of shallots and no red onions as I'm not a huge fan of raw onion. And I added apple...because I had one languishing in my fruit basket. Winning! Oh dear, did I just reference Charlie Sheen?]

All this to say, it was a rather long week of staying inside the house every minute of every day save necessary outings: like dropping the boys off at school. That, my friends, makes for a lot of togetherness! [Which is why I was practically salivating at weather reports predicting we'd be back in 'positive' land by Saturday.]

Just how do you keep yourself sane when it’s so cold you want to curse and you’re trapped in the house for six.days.straight?

Craft Projects

I’ve ‘pinned’ all these adorable images that I’ve found in random places on the internet for just such hibernating occasions. So, what I like to do, is allow the artist (usually the Hen, occasionally the Gort) to select an image. Then I do my best to replicate it or create something similar. This often takes anywhere from fifteen to forty-five minutes. And then I hand it to the artist who basically ruins it in less than five minutes.

For example, I recreated a lovely alphabet poster that I’d seen on the Land of Nod website. I actually spent over an hour sketching the letters and the corresponding images. I gave it to the Hen and minutes later, my semi-decent sketches had been turned into blobs of paint. A few of the letters were vaguely reminiscent of the Roman alphabet, but everything else had been turned into colored blobs.

Can you say ‘wow, I’m glad I spent so much time trying to get that Gorilla and Lion just right?’

Obstacle Course

Occasionally, I like to be ‘fun mom’ who recognizes her boys need to expend some energy. So one night after dinner, I ransacked the house looking for suitable objects to create an ‘obstacle’ course in the basement. I returned downstairs with empty yogurt containers (to turn into cones), a pink yoga mat, an ottoman, and a toddler bed gate (i.e. the thing you attach to a ‘big’ bed to keep a newly un-cribbed person from falling on the floor.)

Ta-da: obstacle course.

No one was injured, energy was expended and all three ended up running around without shirts. In other words: huge success.

Play Date

The Gort had expressed a desire to have a play date, so I dispatched an email and arranged said play date. It was pretty much a bust, if I do say so myself. Not only because I had no idea how to connect the Wii when the boys asked, but also because the two younger boys – who are 4 and 2 – attacked our guest. I’m not entirely certain of the details, but it seems the Gort and his guest were running around playing some made-up game with the Toppletree pieces and then our oldest boy wonder told his younger siblings to ‘protect him’. Which, to the younger boys, meant: jump on the person you don’t even know.

For reasons I cannot comprehend, my boy-children insist on reserving their sweet, loving sides for family. Only.The hugging, the reading to each other on the couch, the playing nicely together, the sharing, the offering of sympathies? Unless you’re related to me, you won’t see any of it.

We picked the professor up after work and relayed the details of this highly anticipated play date. The Gort did his morose best to explain to his father what had happened. ‘So your brothers attacked because they were trying to protect you?’ the professor clarified, pride evident in his voice at the display of brotherly ‘love’. I looked at the professor and said ‘I need you to think this was a bad thing.’

Lego

For some reason it drives the professor crazy that the boys dismember their Lego men. They remove arms and heads and torsos and legs, and discard them in the Lego bucket as though they were bricks. So, on Tuesday night, my better half sat in the basement for the better part of an hour, sifting through the hundreds of colored plastic pieces looking for body parts. He painstakingly assembled ‘the guys’ and arranged them ‘just so’ on top of a bookcase.

Several days later, as I poured myself a bowl of pumpkin seed bran flakes, a red-coated Lego soldier tumbled into my bowl. Along with a white Star Wars ‘hat’ and a few other accessories. Hours later, still shaking my head in disbelief over the Lego in my cereal, I vaguely recalled the professor yelling something in the early morning about Lego and cereal.

After picking up the Gort from school and reliving the day’s events, I relayed the story of the Lego in the cereal. They thought this was hilarious, all three of them cackling like hens in the back. Especially Percy, who never knows what’s really going on – but if his brothers laugh, he laughs too. And loudly.

‘I put the Lego guys in the cereal,’ our Hen confessed.

Finally, Saturday came, with temperatures in the (positive) twenties. With considerable weeping and gnashing of teeth, we five managed to climb into the van and drive the five minutes towards the river. The professor sporting a look of pain, as though he’d been volunteered to give a lecture in Syria. With Rick Perry.

For exactly twenty eight minutes, we walked along the river, the boys doing their best to dig up (frozen) rocks so they could throw them in the (frozen) river. It wasn’t quite the same as, say, November, but I’ll admit to having a smile on my face as I breathed in fresh-ish air and looked at something other than the walls inside the house.

Nearly two years passed before I discovered the answer: hot yoga was simply yoga….in a really hot room. (It was also the name of the studio.)

The whole business sounded dreadful – exercising in an overly hot room – so I didn’t give it another thought. Because I don’t like to be hot. Can’t stand it. Whine like a small puppy without food - that’s how much I fuss when it’s more than 83 degrees outside. (Fahrenheit.)

But then it was January and yet another New Year had been ushered in and I was in no better shape than the year before. ‘Do you want to take a yoga class with me,’ a friend asked. And I, willing to try many things at least once (as long as it’s not chicken feet, congealed pork blood or a rollercoaster) said yes.

I arrived at the studio, carrying the hot pink exercise mat I’d purchased at TJ Maxx several years ago on a whim. Under the (misguided) impression that if I purchased a mat….I’d exercise. I wasn’t completely deluded – I have used that mat at least 3 times in the last five years. Most recently on Tuesday night when I created an obstacle course for the crazy, cooped up Johnson boys.

Money well spent, I’m sure.

My friend greeted me in the studio hallway, slightly distressed. ‘It’s really hot,’ she warned me. ‘Like a sauna.I don’t see how you could do this if you were claustrophobic.’

The little bit of courage I’d managed to scrape together in order to don tight pants, threatened to leave me at the mention of the word sauna. I’ve never understood the point of sitting in a wooden shack – essentially steaming oneself to death.

I was the last student to enter the dim room filled with mats and people lying on their backs. The heat…was oppressive. Hovering in the air like one of those thick mats gymnasts somersault onto in their regimented training centers.

Public humiliation aside, I suddenly wished I’d worn a bathing suit instead of black stretchy pants and a t-shirt. ‘There’s no way I’m going to last an hour and fifteen minutes in this room,’ I thought to myself, while seriously contemplating bolting from the room – back to the arctic temperatures that had rendered me housebound for four days. Instead I lay down on my mat. And breathed. ‘The heat is merely an obstacle,’ I tried to reason with myself and breathed some more.

Five minutes later, I sensed an increase in the intensity of my obstacle. Somebody had just turned up the heat.

‘Just lie down when you need to; drink when you need to’ the instructor had suggested in her very-Zen-voice when I told her this would be my first – ever – hot yoga class.

But now, trapped on a mat in a onehundredandeight (108F!) degree room with 47% humidity, I couldn’t fathom attempting even one pose. Posture. Exercise. Whatever. Frankly, I couldn’t even imagine lying on the mat in the room.

I glanced at my tiny green bottle of water with regret. Its measly contents might get me through the first ten minutes. This mirrored den of heat called for one of those beer hats with straws.

The unlikely-to-ever-get-angry instructor started the class with some breathing. Inhaling. Exhaling. The women – regulars, I’m sure – exhaled with such force it sounded like I was lying in a pit of snakes. A very hot, very humid pit of snakes.

And I had to somehow get through 75 minutes of being trapped in the pit?

I gave it a valiant effort. I did the poses, exercises, whatever. I didn’t (exactly) fall over onto the mat. I didn’t embarrass myself – except for revealing my horrifically dry feet to the women behind me. By the end of the class, my shirt was completely drenched in sweat. And my face as red as a – very blissed out – pomegranate.

I was late picking up the professor, so instead of languishing with my icy lemongrass towel, I stuffed my sweaty self back into my way-too-warm down coat. I couldn’t find my socks anywhere, so I stuck my exposed feet into my clogs and hotfooted it back to the car.

Literally.

The one benefit of spending an hour in a hot yoga class? You don’t even notice the cold when you get out.

‘Oh, is it -25 degrees Celsius? I hadn’t noticed.’

‘I got a new pencil,’ he announced, while holding a brand new, brightly colored pencil in the air. So I could see what he was talking about. The pencil was emblazoned with six swirly letters: H-A-W-A-I-I.

‘Ah, did one of your classmates go to Hawaii and bring back pencils for everyone?’ I surmised. A thin layer of envy settling upon me.

‘Yep’, he confirmed, in a matter of fact voice; oblivious to the fact that hanging out in Calgary and moving during Christmas break, might not be quite as fun as, say, sitting on a beach in Maui.

It wasn’t the first time I’d encountered ‘the pencil’. In Kindergarten, the Gort came home one day with a white pencil decorated with colorful flags. There were four letters o’ fun on the side: F-I-J-I. ‘You have a classmate who went to Fiji?!’ I gasped. The Fiji? The one that’s in the middle of some far away ocean, which I will likely never see? (And certainly not with my kids!)

I thought about the Hawaii pencil. ‘Maybe you could get some Calgary pencils and hand them out to your classmates,’ I joked, chuckling while imagining the Gort placing a home-grown pencil on each of his friends’ desks.

I considered this ridiculous scenario for a while, but decided it wasn’t nearly lame enough. Really, he should hand out those ubiquitous yellow-orange pencils, with the word ‘S-T-A-Y-C-A-T-I-O-N’ written in wobbly letters.

Who’s jealous now?

So yes, last week I’d purchased pho (Vietnamese beef noodle soup for the uninitiated) three times. And, because I wasn’t quite sick of all that fish sauce yet, I decided to make my own.

I found a recipe, I wrote a list of ingredients, and I went shopping.

First, to the farmer’s market. Where I stood at the Silver Sage Beef stall and asked stupid questions about bones. One of the guys, possibly the owner, pointed me to a bag of frozen bones and shrugged as I asked about marrow content (because the recipe had specified using only 20% marrow bones otherwise the broth would be too greasy).

I felt like I was buying dog food, to be honest. Even if it was organic dog food.

After procuring the bones, I had a host of other things to find: vermicelli rice noodles, thai basil, and star anise. Could I have gotten these things at the Superstore? Most likely, yes. Did I, instead, drive clear across town to patronize the T & T [Asian] Supermarket?

Most definitely, and with the two oldest wonder boys in tow.

We pulled into the ‘Pacific Plaza’, clearly a designated landing spot for all manner of Asian businesses, judging from the preponderance of foreign-symbol-signs.

The first clue that I’d perhaps gotten more than I’d bargained for? No parking. I ended up squeezing the beastly car-van into a spot designed for a Honda Civic.

We entered the shopping center and found we’d entered another world. Asian liquor store. Asian dentist. Asian restaurants. Bubble Tea. Red everywhere. Large displays of the kinds of items only children find fascinating, like the monster head with the waving arms. Under which an eloquent sign reposed: U Break U Buy.

‘Don’t TOUCH!’ I threatened through clenched teeth because I was not about to drop $20 or $30 on a monster with a waving arm.

We found the entrance to the T&T and I have to say a feeling of adventure descended upon me. ‘Isn’t this exciting?! I sighed wide-eyed.

We stopped at the Tea and Ginseng Stall for some bubble tea. Mango and Coconut for the Gort. Mango and Lychee for the Hen. ‘Large or small’ the kid manning the stand, asked, pointing to the tubs of black pearls. ‘Large?’ I guessed, unsure if one was better than another.

It was all going swimmingly until the boys ingested their first tapioca ball. Their initial enthusiasm died. Immediately.

But, as children who’ve gotten expensive treats for centuries have done, they didn’t come right out and say: ‘blech, gross, I don’t like this bubble tea.’ No, theirs was a much more subtle disengagement. They began holding their cups by their sides, far away from their mouths. After a while the cups were placed in the shopping cart. ‘Could you carry this for a while,’ one of them asked politely. And after that they said things like ‘when I get home, I’m going to share this with Percy.’

The kiss of death, the final farewell: voluntarily sharing something with one’s baby brother.

If I had to list my three biggest fears, I might say: (1) being involved in a car crash, (2) something happening to any of the Johnson boy-men and (3) China.

Yes, I have a deep-seated fear of China. Strange, but true. When I think of China, I think of (no offense to my vast Chinese readership) too many people, pollution and scary food. I also think of poop, and for this I mostly blame David Sedaris. I’d been aware of the Chinese habit of defecating in public, but then I paid money and listened to David Sedaris talk about it at length. Though I laughed, I also twisted my insides from physically cringing at least a thousand times in fifteen minutes, and could barely ingest my sweet potato fries afterwards. (Do click on the link if you enjoy Sedaris’ stories!)

So there, at the T & T Supermarket, I was sort of facing one of my biggest fears – China. I was navigating a very crowded store, surrounded by scary food (and scary smells) and a surprising number of store displays of Almond Roca.

Is Almond Roca very popular in China?

But, I have to say, navigating a little bit of China is much less scarier than tackling the real deal. I found the star anise. Found the rice noodles (or the entire aisle devoted to them, I should say) and I even walked away with a package of kaffir lime leaves which I’ve never seen anywhere else.

And then I walked back to my hulking minivan (whilst carrying two rather full cups of bubble tea) and drove off into the [Western] sunset, delighting in my ability to read the road signs.

At home, I parboiled the meat bones. I boiled the meat bones. I skimmed the fat. I skimmed more fat. I made a ‘spice bag’ to hold the star anise, cinnamon stick, coriander seeds, etc. For three hours I tended that broth, all while the Gort darted in and out of the kitchen: ‘is it ready yet? Is it ready now? Can I have some?’

It was 9pm when we Johnsons finally sat down to eat the homemade pho. The homemade pho that was glistening with many, enormous pools of grease – because there’d been too much marrow in the bones.

The verdict: my pho was rather tasty (once I left the broth overnight in the refrigerator and chiselled off three inches of grease.)

But as I sat there eating my tasty soup, I did some math: five to six hours of my time (if you include the shopping trips) and money spent on ingredients and gas for the car…..yep, I spent more than what I would have if I’d driven to Lemongrass and ordered 5 bowls of #38, not too spicy.

So we loaded the boys in the car-van and headed to the strip mall containing the all-purpose store. The same strip mall that also houses a Vietnamese restaurant. ‘Why can’t we just eat at home,’ the Gort lamented. As if it was terribly inconvenient for him to have to sit in a car and be driven to a restaurant.

It was one of those parental moments where you just want to swivel your head 180 degrees so your fiery gaze can fully incinerate the conscience of the complainer in the back. Where you want to say things like ‘do you have any idea how tired I am from countless nights of staying up way too late, schlepping boxes all over creation, trying to create a home for you while inconveniencing you as little as possible?! We can’t eat at home because I am, quite simply, too tired to make even macaroni and cheese from a box.’

But, these are the things you can’t say to a child. Not out loud anyway. Instead, I mumbled something about being too tired and we pulled into a parking spot and settled ourselves in a booth by the window.

We’ve only eaten Vietnamese food twice before, so I was at a bit of a mental loss while flipping through the expansive menu. What to get? What to get. And then I remembered about that noodle soup – that ‘pho’ – that ‘everyone’ is always talking about.

I scanned the menu looking for something called pho. Nothing. But there was something called ‘traditional vietnamese beef noodle soup’. Surely the same thing? It was settled. Number 38. Not too spicy.

Minutes later, the owner set an enormous bowl of broth and noodles and tiny pieces of meat before me. Along with a ‘condiment’ plate of bean sprouts, limes and reasonably fresh looking cilantro and thai basil.

I dipped my spoon, tasted, and I was sold. Slightly spicy, sweet, salty, and fragrant. ‘Do you want to try some of mine,’ the professor asked. ‘Nope,’ I declined, without the customary counter-offer of a sample of my dish.

Five minutes later, the younger boys had gotten restless and the professor had finished his meal, while I’d barely made a dent in my trough of pho. So they headed over to Canadian Tire while the Gort and I sat side by side in the booth, finishing the gynormous bowl of soup.

The very next day, having endured a trip to the Superstore with the wonder-triplets, I found myself slumped in the driver’s seat. Starving. With, as luck would have it again, a take-out menu from the Lemongrass Restaurant. The same restaurant we’d frequented eighteen hours earlier. I even had a cell phone. With a charged battery.

I dialed the number. ‘Number 38. Not too spicy. Take out.’

And, ten minutes later, I was back in the car with an aromatic white plastic bag; heading home.

I divided the soup among four bowls and we ate our (repeat) lunch rather happily. ‘Can you get these noodles again tomorrow?’ the Gort asked. I imagined driving to Lemongrass again and again until I became ‘number 38, not too spicy’ at first glance. Like Norm from Cheers, but instead of sliding me a beer, they’d just hand me styrofoam containers in a plastic bag.

I imagined my bank account riddled with daily $9 debits while picturing the four of us suffering from some sort of fish sauce-induced scurvy.

‘Mmmmm, yeah, probably not.’ I dashed my oldest’s dreams.

But then Friday rolled around. And I’d spent half the day driving the Gort to and from a birthday party, visiting the likes of Costco and the farmer’s market. It was 4pm. And I was tired. And there ‘happened’ to be a Korean-Vietnamese restaurant in the vicinity.

I ordered what I thought was their version of ‘number 38, not too spicy’ but when I got home, I knew I had a pho-fail on my hands. After two bites, my mouth was on fire; any semblance of flavor obliterated by the presence of too much heat – clearly intended to mask the subpar broth.

So I did what anyone else would do. I decided to make my own pho.

‘Oh, so you want proof that she’s real,’ I taught him a new word. Which he liked. ‘Yeah. Proof.’

‘Do you think if she can get under a pillow, that she could lift up an ink pad?’ And I was barely listening to him at this point, smiling at the mental image of a fairy flying through the air carrying an ink pad. Scheming how I could produce a convincing fairy ‘foot print’.

I resigned myself to making a trip to Michael’s to pick up some tiny ink pad in a ‘fairy’ color. [Even though I vow at least once a week never to return to Michael's again; store that hands out 40% off coupons that are never valid when I'm actually there.]

When the professor came home in the evening, I relayed the story about the tooth fairy and the proof. And he howled with laughter – because sometimes we just don’t know where this boy actually came from: so exact, so adamant, so….first-born.

‘So what’s Nicola going to do,’ my better half ruminated, knowing full well that I intended to produce fairy proof. ‘Are you going to use one of Percy’s footprints?’ he asked-suggested. And I stared at him with disbelieving eyes. Yes, Percy does have the smallest feet of all our boys – by far – but seriously? Who would ever try to pass off size (barely) 8 toddler feet as ‘fairy feet’?

‘Uh, I was thinking of something a little smaller,’ I shook my head; using my thumb and forefinger to indicate a slightly more appropriate fairy foot size. Like a quarter of an inch, maybe.

‘True,’ he realized the error of his ways, ‘[Percy's foot] would be more like chubby fairy,’ he agreed whilst flapping his arms to indicate – I’m guessing – a fairy of Rubenesque proportions.

‘Mom!’ the Gort yelled an hour or so later. ‘My tooth fell out.’ And I sighed because I had hoped for at least a twenty four hour reprieve in this fairy-proof-business. ‘Yeah, it just fell out while I was brushing my teeth,’ he announced in a voice that was part disbelief, part amazement. And I had to laugh because the tooth had been so loose, he could almost rotate it 360 degrees.

‘Where’s the stamp pad,’ he asked urgently, eager to set things up for the fairy. Luckily I have the ‘we just moved’ card at my disposal for at least three more days. ‘Uh, I don’t know,’ I stalled. Because I really didn’t know which of the twenty generically labelled boxes might contain ‘ink pads’.

And also, it dawned on me that I could play the ‘tooth fairy doesn’t know your new address’ card at breakfast.

We were smack in the middle of our tenth move-every-item-we-own move in fifteen years. I had spent New Year’s Eve climbing stairs while carrying boxes, buckets, children, carpets and it had all sucked. Because moving pretty much sucks the life out of you.

The only way moving does not suck is when you pick up the phone and dial North American Van Lines (or some full-service moving company) and drive to Starbucks while three of their employees pack up your entire household (in less than four hours) and load all of it into a moving van. All in the time it takes you to have a second latte.

In that instance, moving is nearly tolerable, even though you are quite possibly bankrupt by the end of the process. And you stand a reasonable chance of opening a fancy, unblemished moving box and finding a trash can with trash still inside it. True story.

So in lieu of paying the price of a small used car, we opted for the slightly more cost-effective, grey-hair-inducing method of packing our own belongings and hiring a truck with three movers. All while trying to celebrate Christmas with the boys, visit with my mom – who perhaps rued the timing of her trip after scouring my chicken-roasting-oven for over an hour – and celebrate the anniversary we didn’t get to celebrate this summer because we were travelling.

It was[n't] the best of times. It was[n't] the worst of times.

But in the end, our belongings made their twenty-block journey and we all ended up with a place to sleep and a place to eat. And, as happens after childbirth, we immediately began the process of erasing the worst memories so that we could pretend (after a few days) that it ‘really wasn’t that bad’.

Which is just as well since we’ll have to repeat this feat before my next birthday.

But in the meantime, we’ll amuse ourselves with the functioning dishwasher. (Glasses without disgusting crud at the bottom! Who knew!) A dryer that dries clothes in less than an hour and a half. (Do the math: nine loads of clothes, which is a standard occurrence for the five of us – translates into 13.5 hours of drying time, alone.) And frolicking among the more than six inches of kitchen counterspace and six cupboards in which to store kitchen items.

‘I feel like we’re living in one of those vacation rental properties,’ the professor exclaimed after we’d moved in; when we were still slightly euphoric from the abundance surrounding us: shelves! closets! closets with shelves! a basement….without poop! a non-leaking shower….without mold! (What can I say – when you’ve lived in as many places as we have, you learn to make do.)

Perhaps 2012 will be the year we reclaim our sanity.

Stay tuned.