Be It Ever So Humble

Tags

British Columbia, friends, home, moving, Nova Scotia, travel

I had a new experience this year, while “home” for Christmas in Nova Scotia.

…I missed home.

West Coast home.

…Things have changed.

While I spent my early childhood in Ontario and the Caribbean before settling in Nova Scotia, the Maritimes were always “home” to me.

I loved my home town and my university fiercely, and I have made many, many, many posts about how much I miss it, and how much I love the close-knit culture of the East Coast. Perfect Husband, who grew up on the South Shore, feels the same.

It used to be that whenever we traveled back to Nova Scotia, we would be hyper-vigilant to change: That store moved to a different location! That other store is gone! Someone repainted that house! They put in a STOP SIGN!

Things change all the time, slowly, but when you’re only home once every year or two you see them all at once, and it feels like you have entered some sort of strange parallel universe where everything looks slightly wrong.

Perfect Husband especially would get indignant about changes made to his neighbourhood back home (which is the sort of neighbourhood where people look out the windows and wonder “who is that?” when they see an unfamiliar car).  It hurt him to see developers come in and destroy his old stomping grounds and built large vacation homes on top. It hurt more when one of the wealthy retirees who moved into those houses called the home where he and his four siblings grew up a “quaint little cottage”.

That was his home, and it has been largely plowed over and rebuilt, and he resents it.

But we have come to accept over the years that Nova Scotia is not our personal museum, and now it has gotten to the point where I am surprised by what hasn’t changed after all this time: The local convenience store is still there, with the same sign. My favourite Pita Place, still going strong. The neighbourhood houses which seem to have used the exact same Christmas lights for the past twenty years.

The changes no longer faze me. I have accepted that life goes on. I’m just delighted by what stays the same.

Nova Scotia has also emptied itself. Most of my friends have evacuated in search of jobs that suit their education level. Of the remaining old friends and relatives, I only saw a couple. Traveling was challenging for us with two kids in tow, and they didn’t have the time or inclination to travel to see us. They were all busy with their own lives and kids during the holidays and I am just not relevant to those lives any longer.

It isn’t their fault, it’s mine – I’m the one who left. Besides, with Facebook I can still chat with them and see pictures of them and their families, so maybe the need to see each other in person is less urgent because of that.

Really, I was touched by the couple of people who did take time out of their day to meet up with me when I was passing through their region. The holidays are a busy time, and the weather was not always great. So it meant a lot to me when they did.

Nova Scotia just… doesn’t belong to me any more, and it doesn’t miss me or need me. I felt strangely superfluous on this visit, except among immediate family.

Meanwhile, BC has been growing on me slowly for a long time. It took me years to start putting down real roots, and up to a few years ago I desperately missed Nova Scotia and wanted to go home.

But I finally built a strong support network of friends. Besides, the mountains and the cherry blossoms get to you over time, and I have started to take pride in the beauty.

I loved the look on my Mother In Law’s face on her first week staying with us last year, when she saw crocuses coming up. Just small trips around town had her amazed.

“I went to the grocery store and they had FLOWERS on display outside!”

“…isn’t that normal?”

“Carol, it’s JANUARY!”

“Wait until you see the fruit and vegetable market. It doesn’t have walls.”

And when my parents came out, they kept taking pictures of daffodils while their friends back home sent them photos of snow piles up past their shoulders.

It made me proud, because BC is starting to feel like it is mine.

 

 

I love the early spring, and the long, dry, but not-too-hot summers. I love the snow on the mountains, and the mix of skin colours, languages, cultures and cuisines all around us.

So, while I cherished every day of our time with the family, and I ate a lot of pitas, it also felt really good to come home. I missed our bed, our bathroom, and even our cluttered, toy-laden living room and minuscule kitchen.

It’s not perfect, but it’s ours.

And I kept getting texts from my friends here, asking when they could see me, now that I was finally back… back home.

In Which We Risk Medical Emergency/Financial Ruin To Meet Firefly Stars

Tags

Andy Runton, comicon, emerald city comicon, Firefly, Gina Torres, Jewel Staite, labour, Owly, pregnancy, seattle, star trek, travel

Everyone said we were crazy to do it, and we knew that they were right.

You do not travel two weeks away from your due date.

You especially do not travel close to your due date IN THE UNITED STATES.

The cost of American health care is infamous. BC radio is filled with Pacific Blue Cross commercials featuring John Cleese, in which he plays a greedy American (?) doctor called Nigel Bilkington who does x-rays on you just to make sure you have your wallet on you before you even receive care.

(Want to hear? I found one here.)

On the way to the border there are big signs reminding you that even a day trip can result in a broken bone and thousands of dollars of debt.

It’s important to remind Canadians of this because we take free health care for granted.

PH and I have cross-border insurance.

But no insurance will cover you if you wander into the states while totally full-term and end up having a baby there. I can’t even imagine what an emergency C-section or something would cost.

So why would we go?

We go to Emerald City Comicon in Seattle every year. It has become a family tradition. Every year we get a new family portrait with some geeky-famous person. The first year was George Takei.

The next year was Patrick Stewart.

My new favourite family photo

I didn’t get around to posting about it last year, but we went again and got our photos taken with Alan Tudyk, otherwise known as Wash from Firefly as well as about a million other characters.

He put his arm around me. It was awesome.

This year, Levar Burton was scheduled to be there, and I couldn’t miss my chance at getting a photo with Geordie LaForge/The Reading Rainbow guy.

So we bought tickets. I bought a maternity shirt that read “The Next Generation” right over my belly.

We also packed a hospital bag.

We figured that if we drove like hell, we could probably get back to the border within a couple of hours, and there was a hospital just across the border. All I had to do was hold the baby in ’til we got there.

Everyone told us it was a bad idea.

They were right.

No Sun Of Mine, Or, In Which I Suspect My Child Of Vampirism

Tags

light, SAD, sun sensitivitiy, sunglasses, sunshine, toddlers, travel

Owl is well nicknamed.

You guys did a good job with that.

Boy oh boy, is he an Owl. My child hates the sun. HATES IT.

He is a true child of Vancouver.

He happily announces that “it’s sunny out, today” if it happens to not be raining.

And if sun gets in his eyes? Oh boy. Screaming, writhing, gnashing of teeth. “AAAH, SUNNY! NO! MAKE SUN GO ‘WAY! AAAAAAARGH….” I expect him to wail that he’s meeeeelting and simply disappear into a puddle.

It’s weird because he’s not particularly reactive to other aspects of environment. He doesn’t mind fluctuations of temperature, he’s not picky about textures or textiles, he doesn’t cover his ears when things get too loud. He doesn’t mind the dark. But sun? Sun is EVIL.

One morning there was a glorious sunrise outside, and he was scared of it.

“No go in sunrise! NO! Make sunrise go ‘WAY!”

Clearly he thought the sun was overtaking the world with its fiery minions.

It’s hard to believe he is related to me. I grew up on the island of Curacao, which looks like this: Rain was so rare there that when it happened, the teachers let us out of class to go play in it. Every now and then it would rain so hard that the storm drains would overflow and we would get a Rain Day off school, but that only happened once every couple of years.

I wonder if that is why I’m so sensitive to the seasons. I get so sluggish and sleepy and depressed in the winter, whereas in summer I am much less depressed (usually) and often an insomniac. Maybe I just got accustomed to sunlight when I was a kid.

The sun charges my batteries, lightens my gloom, and colours my world.

Meanwhile, my child thinks that the sun is everything that is wrong and evil.

The only thing we agree on about the sun is that it makes us sneeze. The first sign I had that he was related to me (we hadn’t noticed his webbed toe, yet, which he got from me) was when we took him home from the hospital and he sneezed in the sun. The sun always makes me sneeze.

But to me, it’s just a sneeze. When the sun makes Owl sneeze he screams and writhes as though he thinks he’s going to sneeze himself into dust, even though he doesn’t mind sneezes in general.

Anyway, you can imagine how much he liked that warm California sun.

The first two days at Disneyland we had to keep our little vampire in the shade at all times, because every time the stroller had to enter direct sunlight Owl would go from happy irrepressible extrovert to writhing ball of screaming misery. “AAH, NO, SUNNY. SUN HURTED MY EYES, NOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Even if we handed him something to hide his face behind he would moan and squirm and sob until we were safely back in the shade.

So I started to look for sunglasses. It is HARD to find sunglasses to fit his tiny little head. Every set I looked at was size three and up. Owl was wearing 12 months shirts. You can imagine how well the search for sunglasses went. I spent our entire week in Vegas shopping for sunglasses for him with no success, and now I was repeating the continuous string of disappointments in Anaheim.

Eventually, on the night of the second day, I found a pair that almost fit. So I bought them, telling him that they would make the sun go away.

Well, it worked. The next day was cloudy.

But it’s okay, Owl will use them. You see, spring is arriving in Vancouver, and the other day it was partly sunny, and he was NOT IMPRESSED.

Problem solved.

In Which I Become A Single Parent With A Toddler In Disneyland, And Get Very Cute Videos

Tags

disneyland, parenting, rides, toddlers, travel, two year olds

Well, the Karmic Realignment hit Perfect Husband’s gastrointestinal system shortly after midnight. He spent the night vomiting violently and the day groaning in bed while I carted Owl around Disneyland by myself.

It could have been worse.

As much as it sucked to leave poor PH in the dark of our hotel room and play single parent at the happiest place on Earth, and as challenging as it was for me to find food and potties in a timely manner without my Map Man, Owl and I still had a really good day.

(As a side note, possibly due to sleep deprivation I recurrently misread signs announcing that “The Happiest Place on Earth Just Got Happier” as saying “The Happiest Place On Earth Just Got Herpes.”)

Ready to start another day

He hugged a bunch of dressed up characters (insisting in getting in line for a second dose of Goofy hugs).

We did Peter Pan’s Flight which was too dark and jerky and he bumped his chin on the stop at the end.

I took him on a carousel as consolation, and then he fell in love with the Finding Nemo Submarine (which WAS frigging awesome – they have underwater holograms of the Nemo characters so it’s like they actual animated characters are swimming right out your window in 3D).

Even though the ride has a faux explosion and a scary lanternfish, the young set loved it. The 18 month old next to me surprised her parents (who I previously had heard arguing over whether she was old enough to appreciate anything, ever) by absolutely adoring the bubbles and fish.

That was the first ride which wasn’t a carousel that Owl demanded to go on repeatedly. I think we went on it three or four times.

In the late afternoon, PH managed to stagger out of the room long enough to find us in line for yet another round of Finding Nemo, and come with us to the evening parade.

On the last day PH was still feeling sick, but was at least able to walk around. We took Owl to Goofy’s Kitchen for breakfast which blew his little mind. SO MANY CHARACTERS TO HUG. Pluto led him by his hand to our seats and we were visited by Chip, Dale (who liked to jump up behind people), Goofy, Belle, and Rafiki of all people.

Owl was in extrovert heaven. I have very cute videos of him demanding that Rafiki “Come hi me.”

Then we did Pirates of the Caribbean (which Owl weathered surprisingly well), and the Monsters, Inc ride which Owl insisted on repeating four times in a row and featured a holographic Randall who appears out of thin air and then disappears again.

If you go to Disneyland, go in February. Look at the line for the Monsters, Inc ride.

That is a 0 minute wait, right there.

We did those 4 repetitions within a half an hour. The longest line we had to wait in was probably 20 minutes for Finding Nemo.

Then we went to A Bug’s Land and that was where Owl found his Mecca – Heimlich’s Chew Chew Train which features (get this): A hungry caterpillar train that goes around eating GIANT PIECES OF FOOD.

OWL HEAVEN!

Heimlich munches his way through a giant apple, a giant watermelon (which smells like watermelon) and a giant box of cookies (which smells like COOKIE). My food obsessed toddler spent forty minutes going on this ride again and again AND AGAIN.

“Caterpillar EATED DE WATERMELON, MOMMY!”

Finally, PH took Owl back to Carsland to say goodbye to McQueen and Mater while I went on Soaring Over California, which was awesome and not at all scary, as promised by the coworker who recommended it.

And then we grabbed a bite of sub-par food (which is just called “food” at Disneyland and costs about three times as much as it is worth), finally found a stuffed Nemo (Owl insisted in picking up Dory while we were at it), and it was time to say goodbye to Disneyland.

Exteroverted out. FINALLY.

Here is a montage of our three days at the most Oppressively Happy Place On Earth. Beware, it contains a lot of Owl hugs.

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/59408366]

I’ll Be Home For Christmas… Next Year?

Tags

Christmas, distance, family, traditions, travel

We aren’t going home for Christmas this year.

Not only is it expensive to do every year, but PH couldn’t get Christmas Eve off of work, and since that’s when his family celebrates, it would be $4,000 for him to miss Christmas anyway.

So we aren’t going, even though I’m an only child and my parents will be spending Christmas alone together for the first time in 30 years. Even though PH’s brother just moved back to Nova Scotia, so it would be the first time his entire family would be together in one room since our wedding, and the first Christmas entirely together in… who knows how many years.

We aren’t going, even though my parents have decided that they can’t come here, either, which is what they did in 2008 when we were recovering from the costs of our honeymoon.

My Dad’s health is pretty good overall, considering his age and considering the fact that his two older siblings both died of cancer in the last five years. But he’s not up for travelling long distances any more. It’s too much hassle and he would rather spend a quiet Christmas at home. Even if Owl and I aren’t there.

My mother is depressed about it. Dad thinks it’s time that PH and I developed our own family traditions, had a private Christmas together, but my Mum would say “Eff that!” and come in a heartbeat if she didn’t think that leaving Dad and the diabetic cat alone for Christmas was probably wrong.

I’m… ok.

It’s hard to explain to someone with siblings how close-knit your family unit is when you are an only child. A friend of mine from Toronto happened to be in Vancouver one day so we went to lunch and we ended up talking about it – when you’re an only child, Christmases are quiet and intimate.

People talk about obligatory family spats and awkward moments at Christmas. My ex used to call me in tears on Christmas Day, after his traditional fight with his mother. In blog posts I hear people talk about a family disagreement as if it is as much a part of Christmas as cranberry sauce.

Yeah, I don’t know what that’s about. We have never had a Christmas argument in the history of ever.

In fact, my family’s Christmases are so idyllic that our yearly tree trimming always attracted a few of friends, who enjoyed watching the fire, sipping my Dad’s heavy-handed egg nog, and decorating our tree while Karen Carpenter sang about sleighs and snow.

For the next two weeks my parents would spend every evening sitting by the fire, listening to music, sipping wine and occasionally sighing “what a pretty tree!”

Christmas Eve we would go to the midnight mass and sing Silent Night by candlelight, and then my parents would send me to bed and Santa would come.

Yes, that’s right, long after I achieved adulthood my parents continued to do the Santa thing, because I was still in the place of the child.

Only last year did things begin to change. We got Owl to bed and I participated in stocking stuffing.

This year my parents will just have each other, and since my mother stuffs both sets of stockings, I know she’s going to be bummed right out.

It will be easier on me – I’ll have Owl to think about, and really children are what make Christmas fun.

He’s discovering Christmas, and I love it.

“Yook! Wismus yights!”

“Yook! Wismus tree!”

“Yook! A man a beard. Santa.”

He still doesn’t really understand, though, so we’ll be talking him through Christmas the way we did last year. He understands presents, that’s for sure.

We’re planning a Skype session – maybe if I set up my netbook or my itouch in the right spot, my parents (and maybe even PH’s parents) can watch Owl opening his gifts.

I suspect that won’t be quite the same, though.

Hopefully next year, we’ll be having a White Christmas again.

In Which Owl Discovers The Fair

Tags

animals, pacific national exhibition, parenting, Playland, PNE, the fair, toddlers, tourism, travel, Vancouver

Every year we go to the Fair at the PNE (Pacific National Exhibition).

It happens in August, and I remember going the day before Owl’s due date, so it really helps me mark the years. Last year Owl was a somewhat passive participant, although he enjoyed patting the slimy cow noses.

He still loves that part.

But this year was even better. 

He had a blast, extrovert that he is. 

Plus, I discovered that a friend of mine had decided to go with her family the same day, so we met up. She directed me to a section that I didn’t even know existed, where there they had a competition for best playground set-up.

AMAZING.

Owl revelled in the ball pit (of course), and then in the hexagonal play house with the slide, and then he disappeared into this crazy rabbit-warren of construction where he (according to my friend’s teenage son, who attempted to follow him) “took ridiculous angles”.

Basically, he ran totally amok, ate all my popcorn and generally had a glorious day.

Now we just have to help him understand that he has to wait until next year to do it all over again.

A Week in Wisconsin – Part Of Owl’s Heritage

Tags

family, home, in-laws, travel, wisconsin

Well, here we are, home.

Our week with Perfect Husband’s relatives in Wisconsin was an odd combination of relaxing and incredibly exhausting.

On the one hand, we mostly just hung around his grandmother’s house. There was a lot of watching baseball on TV, listening to repetitive stories, and meeting distant in-laws that I will never see again.

On the other hand, we mostly just hung around his grandmother’s house. There was a lot of watching baseball on TV, listening to repetitive stories, and meeting distant in-laws that I will never see again.

I felt like I had to mind my p’s and q’s at all times, because PH has terrified me with stories about his grandmother, who did have a penchant for recounting memories of times when she felt insulted, and graphic descriptions of the violence she wanted to commit in return (I heard the phrase “My, I wanted to jest to punch her face in!” far too many times).

In reality, she was perfectly sweet to me and just doted on little Owl. “C’mere and let me feed you!” she barked at him regularly, and then she’d chuckle as she spoon-fed him yogurt. “He’s just like a little bird!”

But I still lived in fear. PH told me not to read in front of her, because apparently the sight of other people reading has been known to insult her in the past. So mostly I just sat.

When possible we made excursions. We took PH’s mother and Owl to a Brewer’s game and we drove up to Green Bay where PH and his sister drooled over Lambeau Field and Owl toddled around going “Foot. Ball. Foot. Ball.”

But mostly, it was relatives, relatives, and more relatives.

Only one of these relations actually showed up for our wedding, so I hadn’t met most of them. PH barely recognized many of them himself, and had no idea who others were. His American branch of the family doesn’t have much in common with the Canadian side.

Our stay with his distant relations involved a lot of racking my brain for polite rejoinders to announcements like these:

“Women must be stupid for going through the pain of childbirth more’n once.”

“We were so poor even the black kids weren’t allowed to play with us!”

“Mormon’s aren’t Christians!”

“I just had the most blessed bowel movement!” 

Ultimately, even though everyone was very nice to me, I was relieved to leave. I think it was more exhausting to my introvert sensibilities than all of Las Vegas.

But Owl certainly learned a lot about sports while we were there – PH is delighted.

A Canadian Extrovert In Las Vegas

Tags

babies, Las Vegas, photos, toddler, travel

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Eating Out With A Toddler: A Survival Guide

Tags

dining, eating, parenting, restaurants, toddlers, travel

This pie-chart has been floating around lately:

It’s funny, and to a certain extent it’s true. When I was a newlywed, PH and I went to dinner with an old friend of his and her 18 month old. The child threw crayons, ran amok through the restaurant, and basically destroyed the meal while his mother went “Oh, you little monkey!”. This pie chart totally applied, and I thought “I’ll NEVER let my child behave like that”. Then I questioned myself.

Thankfully, I am now a mother of a 22 month old and I never let him throw crayons at people.

Eating out with Owl isn’t too difficult for us, and it’s a good thing, because we don’t have a bar fridge in our crappy Excalibur hotel room (in fact, for the first five days, we didn’t even have a door that locked. It took us two days to notice this, and then three days of wheedling to get someone to fix it).

Ordering into the room didn’t work.

So we do have to go OUT. To restaurants. With humans in them.

It hasn’t been nearly as much of a hassle as the pie chart makes it sound.

We even took Owl to a fancy steakhouse and were hardly humiliated at all. Part of that is probably Owl’s sunny disposition and the fact that he is a good eater.

Yes, he has TWO FORKS in his hand.

I notice, though, that there are a few key things that other parents are doing differently from us, and I think that they may be making some mistakes.

You see, we have Strategy.

And so, I bring you…

How To Eat Out With A Toddler And Survive It

(Or, “The way that works for us”)

1. Bring toys and books.

Do not expect your dazzling conversation to entertain the child. I see a lot of parents trying to wrestle a toddler into sitting still with no distractions. It makes me wonder where their brains are. I know that Owl is a little perpetual motion machine and if we want him to remain in place, we need to at least give his little gyrating brain something to hover around.

2. Let the kid run around first.

Do not bring a child who is filled with energy to the table. Toddlers need to move. You keep a child in a stroller for most of the day and try to plunk them down at the table and let me know how that goes. Owl needs to MOVE, so we try to make sure he gets some running and climbing time in before we try and sit him down.

3. Don’t bloody order a kid’s meal unless you really have to.

The average toddler eats just a couple of spoonfuls of food at each meal, and kid meals are aimed at the 6 and 7 year olds of the world. What a waste of money. Besides, if your kid is like our kid, he’ll just want to eat whatever you’re eating anyway. Owl thinks it’s suspicious if we feed him something we aren’t interested in eating ourselves. If you know for a fact that your baby won’t touch a bite of your meal, then fine, go ahead, but you have been warned.

4. Take your baby for a walk once dinner has been ordered.

Once you’ve picked your meal, take the kid by the hand and go for a stroll around (or even outside of) the restaurant. Do not let him climb under other people’s tables, remove other people’s cutlery from the table, or chuck crayons at people.

5. Feed or don’t feed your baby as necessary while you are waiting.

If your child hasn’t eaten for hours and is on the verge of a hunger meltdown, ask for some bread or fruit to be brought out ASAP. Waiters are usually willing to jump whatever hurdles are necessary to prevent a full toddler tantrum at one of their tables. If, on the other hand, your child is not about to perish from hunger, then don’t give him snacks until dinner arrives. If food arrives and he’s full, you’re in trouble.

5. Once food arrives, immobilize the child.

Owl is old enough for a booster seat but we still request a high chair, though we don’t put him in it until his food arrives. If he wasn’t penned in, he’d be scaling me like a try and trying to yank my nipples out of my shirt. Once in the high chair with food in front of him (the food being the key part here) he has something to distract him.

6. The Copycat Trick:

If Owl is playing with his food more than he is eating it, I try this trick – Break off part of your meal (a small mouthsized bite) and put it on his plate. Then pick up your own ocrresponding portion and show it to him: “Mommy has steak. Does Owl have steak?”. A quick scan of his plate will reveal to him that yes, indeed, he DOES have steak. Wait until he picks it up and then grin at him. Show him yours and open your mouth and wait expectantly. When he does the same, gobble your bite of food and watch him imitate you.

7. Don’t force him to eat.

It’s okay to not be hungry. Provide more toys and books if you child has no interest in the meal, or take turns holding his hand and walking him around the restaurant while the other person eats. Just keep him busy and enjoy your meal.

We never get dirty looks – only coos and comments on the size of his eyes. I’d say we probably spend up to 30% of our time eating! :-p

Like I say, Owl is naturally fairly cheerful and he loves to eat, so I think we’ve been given a head start.

But still – seriously? 10% of your time begging a toddler to eat something violently orange which doesn’t remotely resemble your delicious salmon en croute? Not the way I would do it at all.

Blog Tag: In Which I Answer Questions And Posit My Own

Tags

Blogging, blogs, first memories, memes, questions, sports, tag, tests, travel, web browsers

I’ve been tagged by Life Starts Now, so the game is afoot!

The rules for playing blog tag are simple:

1- You must post the rules
2- Answer the questions the tagger set for you in their post
3- Create eleven new questions to ask the people you’ve tagged
4- Tag eleven people with a link to your post
5- Let them know they’ve been tagged

Here are the questions I was given.