I got Googled!

I was playing around in the referral logs (another exciting Friday night - who needs a date when there is technology to while away the hours?) and I noticed one of the referrals was a Google query. (Tangent: My blog is Google-able -- I had no idea! I'm almost as excited about this as I was about seeing my name in the phone book for the first time. It gives me such a feeling of legitimacy. I'm an official denizen of cyberland now - my blog is on Google!)

So anyway, I clicked on the link, and it shows the Google search return, including the keywords. Someone had keyed in "lonely mommies ottawa ontario." This really struck a chord with me, and I've been thinking about it all weekend. Isn't the Internet truly amazing? You're having a rough night, you really just want someone to talk to, so you key a few words into the search engine and see what comes up. (Beloved, realist that he is, suggested that perhaps the person was looking for lonely mommies for scurrilous reasons, but I chose to eschew that possibility.)

I've met some of my very best friends through the Internet. A few of us going through IVF treatments met on a messageboard, and decided to go out for dinner one night. I remember being so nervous - meeting people I met on the the Web seemed risky and impetuous. Fast forward four years and there are more than 20 of us in a loose online playgroup stretching through four provinces and two states, all of us having travelled the infertility highway and come out the other side, whether by assisted reproductive technology, adoption or surprise. Aside from exchanging e-mails, laughs and parenting tips, those of us who live in the same city get together regularly with and without the kids. These women have completely changed my life and I can't imagine a day going by without reaching out to them, or being touched by them.

Who would have guessed your life could be changed by what pops out of a search engine one night, when you are overwhelmed and alone and needing a friend?

Categories: infertility

A few thousand words in pictures

Thought I'd be a little lazy today. Besides, I wanted to show everybody why I have so much trouble keeping my house clean!

(Isn't he just adorable, though?)

When moms attack

The topic of the day on the blogosphere seems to be moms attacking other moms. Probably, it's a result of that whole Mommy Madness thing in Newsweek (Newsweek makes you pay for articles and I am cheap, so I refer you instead to the very good review of the article in question at Half Changed World) Personally, I suspect the demise of hockey has somehow caused a massive leak of testosterone into the Internet and that is at least partially to blame.

We’ve got a long incredibly funny (as always) examination of mothers criticising mothers over at Chez Miscarriage (go read her post right now – it should be required reading for anybody who is a parent, wants to be a parent or knows a parent. Really, go now, I’ll wait here until you get back. You’ll thank me later.) At Finslippy there is more required reading for not just the parenting manual, but the how to be a nice human manual. Since I have a full coffee and it’s Friday, I’ll even be patient enough to wait while you wander over there and read that post, too, as long as you promise to come right back.

It’s not just blogs. Before I discovered blogging (there was a before blogging?) I used to spend my spare time hanging around the parenting after IVF message boards at IVF Connections. Even among a group of women who had been through a lot together, in a cyber-y kind of way, it never failed to amaze me how quickly they would turn on each other when topics strayed to personal debates like circumcise or no, breast versus bottle, WOHM versus SAHM, and the one that really blew me away, to crockpot or not. I wish I were kidding.

To mitigate all this, over at Been There we have what I think should be a new national holiday -- they’ve declared a Parenting Appreciation Festival. I’m packing my lawn chair and my cooler and joining the party, and I’m inviting you along for the ride. What, ya got something better to do? C’mon, join the fun – just take a minute to say one nice thing to a parent today. If you’re feeling particularly magnanimous, DO something nice for a parent today.

Conveniently, today is also my mom’s birthday, so let me tell you a tiny story about how wonderful she is: yesterday afternoon, our only car broke down and is in the shop overnight. (Another long story, don’t get me started.) But I was going to do groceries last night, and we were out of milk. Not only did my mom pick up the kids from daycare and shuttle them home, not only did she go to the store and pick up some milk to get us through, and not only did she add in a little snacky treat for the kids and for Beloved and I, but she also bought a little bag of biscuits for the DOG! How amazing is that?

Go on, go buy somebody a little baggie of karmic dog biscuits. It’ll do you good!

Potty denial

My son will never forgive me for this. I am about to open a discussion of his potty habits on the Internet. I’m sorry Tristan, I truly am.

I’ve been doing my best to avoid the whole potty-training angst thing. Yes, I know he will probably have his bladder well under control by the time he heads off to college. And yet, despite my best efforts to the contrary, I find myself succumbing to potty peer pressure by proxy. His little girl playmates have long since made the move to underwear, and even most of his little boy playmates can now write their names in the snow or at least play a good game of “shoot the Cheerios in the bowl.” (No, not that kind of bowl. Ewwww!) It’s not like he hasn’t used the potty yet – he’s even managed the oft-elusive poop in the potty on more than one occasion. But we are nowhere near moving to pull-ups and (imagine the day!) regular underwear.

Truth be told, I’m afraid parental denial over the whole potty thing is what has derailed us. I’m beginning to suspect that Tristan has long been ready to make the transition, but lacking any real guidance from management he has been content with the status quo. It falls upon our shoulders, Beloved and I, to take the lead and hurl us forward into life beyond diapers.

It’s just that a world without diapers is so – so – so dreadfully messy and inconvenient. On top of having to remember to feed the boys and dress them and not leave them behind when we go places, now we have to remember to ask every half hour or so if Tristan needs to go (let alone having to trust his judgement.) The punishment for not remembering to ask is pretty effective, granted, but I know me, and I am nothing if not forgetful. Before it gets better it must get messy, and even after all these years, I still have not gotten over my aversion to bodily fluids, especially when not neatly contained by several layers of plastic and absorbent paper.

Do you think if I just ignored the whole thing he will eventually train himself? If I just wait him out, surely one day Tristan will wander into the bathroom, discard his diaper, hop up on the toilet seat and VOILA be trained. Just like that! Don’t laugh, it could happen. (pouting) It could!

Categories: Tristan

From the drawer – the sweater story

A while ago I introduced the concept of “from the drawer,” stories that are not new to those who know me, but are new to my blog. Thanks to Nancy for reminding me about this one from when I had just started back to work after my maternity leave with Tristan, about two years ago.

I’ve been back at work for about three weeks now, and I think I’m finally into the rhythm of the office again. I’ve been working on some pretty high-profile stuff around here, so I get lots of face time with senior management, which is nice for a new employee although some days I really feel like I’m in over my head.

Today was an especially busy day. We had our usual all-staff morning meeting, where I gave an update on my project to the group, and I had a couple of drop-by-my-cube meetings with colleagues. I also spent about 30 minutes on a conference call in my director’s office, sitting across the desk from her while we talked to some of the folks down in Southern Ontario region.

It was about 10:30 by the time I finally made it to the bathroom. I was washing my hands when I caught sight of myself in the mirror and noticed it. IT. In that moment, I became truly cognizant of the definition of mortified. On my sleeve – my creamy white sleeve, no less – smeared from mid-bicep to near my wrist, was a painfully obvious, incredibly nasty two inch wide smear of baby shit. Suddenly I flashed back to the pre-dawn gloaming of Tristan’s room, where I rushed in to grab a little cuddle before running for the bus. I picked him up out of his crib and slung him onto my hip to deliver him to Beloved, blissfully unaware of the toxic ooze seeping out of his Pampers and ingratiating itself with my arm.

As I gazed at my sullied reflection in the mirror, I tried to console myself: “They won’t notice. It’s not that obvious.” It WAS that obvious. THEY NOTICED! You would have to make a Herculean effort of avoidance to miss it, and I just knew my colleagues weren’t up to the task.

I tried to at least mitigate the damage. First, I tried to rub it off. Have you ever tried to rub dried baby shit off cotton ribbed knit? Then thought maybe a little water might do it. Which worked, inasmuch as it diluted the stain by about 20 per cent and spread it over an area about 300 per cent of the original stain. So I rolled up the sleeve as much as I could, which did a great job of drawing attention to the goodly part of the stain still visible, left the other sleeve down, and tried valiantly not to make eye contact with anyone in my office for three months.

My preschooler the junkie

I was wandering around on Mimilou, which BTW, is a smart and funny blog worth reading, and she was talking about how her son has discovered Bob the Builder and Thomas the Tank Engine. It got me thinking about how we’re just about at the one year anniversary of our own indoctrination into the cult of Thomas and Bob (or, as Tristan called Bob way back then – for reasons that were never clear – “dat dat chh”.) Was there really life before them? Surely it was an empty existence.

I’m not sure who is more addicted to Bob and Thomas, Tristan or Beloved. Tristan has the habit, but Beloved is his dealer. We actually spent an entire day last summer scouring the toy departments of four separate Winners stores when we found out that they had received shipments of the Bob the Builder Brio train characters and were selling them at about 1/3 the price of the big chain toy stores. Just a little bit obsessive, eh? I have to say, though, I’m impressed with the guarantee on the toys – we noticed the paint chipping on Lofty, and Beloved called to find out if they market a touch-up paint for the truly neurotic fans. Turns out they will replace any of the pieces, free of charge, no questions asked. So now we have two entire sets, one for each boy, albeit one a little more worn than the other. I’m not sure whether to be proud or ashamed of ourselves.

Tristan worships “all the guys”, as he calls his growing collection of Bob and Thomas artefacts. He carries them around in a thermal lunch bag that originally contained all the medications we received from the clinic for the in vitro fertilization process that ultimately resulted in Tristan. I find the irony of this simply delicious.

He really is learning something aside from rampant consumerism, though. It awes me to watch him pore over the little catalogues that come from the toy store and name each and every engine – there must be dozens of them. If he can memorize those at three, surely he will be able to memorize long passages from Shakespeare by the time he’s in the first grade, right? He started using the word “splendid” in context at two and a half, as in “Mommy, it’s a splendid day today,” and it was only weeks later that I realized he got it from the Thomas show, where they refer to James as a splendid engine. Hey, my mother credits my twice a day Sesame Street habit in the 1970s with my graduation magna cum laude from university, so I won’t knock it!

But is it just me, or is the Thomas and Friends TV show kind of disturbing? It’s like they just set up a big train table with cameras on it and raided the local community access cable channel for cheap special effects to go with it. Maybe some of Beloved’s elitist attitudes about animation are wearing off on me (he is an animator by training and a teacher by economy) but I’d rather watch the colourful claymation of Bob’s world than Thomas’ eerie rolling eyeballs any day.

Categories: Tristan

It's a GIRL!

I am pleased to announce the arrival of the newest baby in my life. My dear friends Joanne and Jaimie welcomed into the world a gorgeous and perfect baby girl last night. Her name is Amelia Ruth, and she is 7 lbs 4 oz -- just a tiny little peanut!

A girl, a girl, a girl (she sang, dancing around the room) we finally have a GIRL to play with!!

Congratulations, my friends!!

An identity crisis

I can’t do it anymore. I can no longer go on referring to my sons as Luigi and Frankie in this blog. I’ve tried to get used to it, but it feels just plain wrong. May the god of Internet privacy and safety help me, I must come clean and start referring to them by their real names. (Well, Luigi and Frankie are their real names, but a play on their middle names of Louis and Francis.) Luigi, my soon-to-be three year old and too clever by half, is really Tristan. And Frankie, my mischievous and marvellous one-year old goes by Simon in the real world.

Ahhhhh, that feels so much better!

P.S. If you are an evil ne’er-do-well sort, kindly ignore this post and move along to wreak havoc somewhere else.

And she does windows, too!

Of all the things could possibly indicate that I am now in fact a grown up, like for example owning a house, celebrating my 15th year with my employer, being on marriage number two or even mothering two kids and a husband, none have made me feel quite so “arrived” as having a cleaning lady.

I was slow to warm to the idea of hiring a cleaning service. Not that I’m overly fond of cleaning, and I certainly don’t have issues with the idea of having someone else pick up after me. Please, if I could find someone to chew my food for me I’d pay them for it these days. What I find troubling is that now once every two weeks I have to find a home for all the clutter so the cleaning lady can find the dirt and clean it. I think I spend more time putting stuff away the night before the cleaning lady arrives than I ever spent on actual cleaning.

Take vacuuming, for instance. When I vacuum, which I do at least twice a week because we have a 100 lbs golden retriever-German shedder mix polluting the house with buckets of yellow dog hair, I push the vacuum with one hand and use the other to swat stuff out of the way. If the cleaning lady is doing the vacuuming, I feel obligated to put away at least enough of the toys so that she can find the carpet. But as I move through the dining room-turned-playroom (because let’s face it, formal dinner parties are years and years away from happening around here), the wrecking crew of two follows closely behind me liberating books and toys as quickly as I can stash them.

Any qualms I have about the cleaning service disappear when I walk through the door to a (relatively) clean house after work every second Wednesday. What is it about a clean house that seems so peaceful? I always try to make it through the door first so I can savour those few seconds of possibility, of “you know, with just a tiny bit of effort we could probably keep the place looking like this all the time.” And then I fling my coat onto the steps, leave my bag in the hall and toss the mail in the vicinity of the side table, content in the knowledge that I can safely ignore them for another 13 blissfully cluttered days.

Milk for your coffee?

It’s been almost a month since I’ve started back to work, and today is the first day my littlest one didn’t wake up in time for a morning milk before I left for work. Continuing to nurse him twice a day (once around 5 am and once before bed) has been surprisingly easy since I’ve gone back to work. I know he doesn’t really need to be nursed any more, but we’ve found a rhythm that’s working well for us so why tinker with it?

Nursing this baby has been a far different experience from nursing my first son. I hated nursing and persevered only because of sheer stubbornness. My nipples were cracked, blistered and bleeding for weeks, we got thrush, he had reflux and when he started having weight gain issues at four months, I had start supplementing with formula. Weaning was easy: by the age of 10 or 11 months, we were down to nursing only once a day, and he was pretty clear about when it was time to give it up entirely.

But my youngest is a boob man. He was close to seven months before I could convince him to even consider taking a bottle, despite regular attempts. “Gack, mommy, what are you doing? That pacifier is leaking into my mouth, get it out of here! I’m so traumatized by this experience that you must nurse me now!”

So back to today… The good news is, I got to sleep in. The bad news is, I now have more than 12 hours of milk supply built up to carry around with me. Not really a problem just now, but I’m a little worried about how things might be going at around 2 pm when I have a meeting with the director general. I’m pretty sure we’re long past the stage where I might spontaneously leak (oh, the joys of motherhood), but I brought my breast pump to work with me, just in case. Except, there is really nowhere private that I can pump. Doing it in my cube is not really an option. The executive boardroom has lovely comfy chairs, but it's booked solid all day (too bad, there's a nice big TV in there and I could have got my Dr Phil fix while I pumped.) I would do it in the washroom, but can only imagine what the person in the next stall would think when they heard the “whick-wheee, whick-wheee, whick-wheee” of the manual pump emanating from next door. Especially when it is accompanied by the “youch, youch” of trying to get a plastic pump properly latched on an overfull breast, followed by a grateful “ahhhhh” of relief and release. Maybe I could go into the Market at lunch time and accost random mothers pushing strollers, asking if they would mind if I borrowed their babies for just a couple of minutes. A kind of a random act of nursing. That's not too weird, is it?

An uninformed rant on ADHD

I won't pretend to know a lot about the world of ADD, hyperactivity and the like. However, I do have a couple of boys, and said boys are a handful at times. Right now especially, my not quite three-year-old is a bit of a challenge, in much the same way that Paris Hilton is a “bit” of a flake. I do worry, though, that some day my high-energy and very bright boy will get some sort of label and be shunted off his track simply because he is less than sedate, submissive and compliant.

In yesterday’s Globe and Mail there was a piece on the demise of the class clown:

In American schools these days, countless class clowns are sitting down and shutting up," writes Jeffrey Zaslow in The Wall Street Journal. "In chemistry labs, students who used to mix chemicals haphazardly, out of an insatiable curiosity, now focus on their textbooks. In English classes, kids who once stared out the windows, concocting crazy life stories about passersby, now face the blackboard. Ritalin and other drugs for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder have helped many children improve their focus and behaviour . . . Some researchers now wonder if would-be Einsteins and Edisons will choose different career paths because their creativity and drive are dulled by ADHD drugs.
(Thanks to ÜberGeek for flagging this one.)

Last week, Health Canada recalled the ADHD drug Adderal XR, an alternative to Ritalin, “due to safety information concerning the association of sudden deaths, heart-related deaths, and strokes in children and adults taking usual recommended doses .” From 1999 through 2003, fourteen children died and two had strokes while taking the drug. The US equivalent of Health Canada, the FDA, has not taken any action.

So, your kid has been diagnosed with ADHD and you don’t want to start drugging him or her… what to do? How about turning to Multi-sensory Penmanship ?

A recent, radical shift in perspective on ADHD has occurred -- it is neither a "disease" or a "brain deficit." It is now viewed as a "developmental issue of self-control." …Ritalin simply covers up symptoms -- it does nothing to change the impulsive behavior on the long term. Handwriting changes the ADHD brain, reining in and marshalling the emotional energy, so functional productivity can be achieved... With the unfortunate neglect of penmanship for the last 30 years and increasing negative societal influences, it is hardly surprising that illiteracy, learning disabilities and ADHD have flourished.

Yikes.

Misunderstood word of the day: Meme

I was reading something online a while ago, I'm not even sure what, and I came across the term "meme" in reference to one of those questionnaire thingees that we love to send each other (for example, the time travel bit I lifted from The Mother of All Blogs.) I thought, "What a cute little word, meme, and how perfectly it describes these things." However, I was reading it as "me-me", like here's all you need to know about ME ME ME. I even used it in conversation at one point, and got a bit of a perplexed look from the person I was talking to, who obviously wasn't as hip to what's hot on the Internet as me me.

Yesterday, I was disappointed to find out that it is in fact pronounced meem, to rhyme with dream, and has a far more boring definition. Apparently, memes are "a unit of information that replicates from brains and inanimate stores of information, such as books and computers, to other brains or stores of information... In casual use, the term meme is sometimes used to mean any piece of information that is passed from one mind to another." (from Wikipedia)

I kinda liked it better when it was all about me me me...

Categories: memes

We need more words for tired

You know that old myth about how the Inuit have more than 50 words for snow? (My apologies, BTW, for the less than politically correct link, but Uncle Cecil has long held a soft spot in my heart.) Well, I think it's about time we came up with some new words to express the idea of tired. I got 49 entries from Roget’s online thesaurus, and none of them come close to what I'm feeling these days.

When I talk to my childless friends and they say they are tired, it is increasingly difficult for me to restrain my rolling eyeballs. You do not, my friend, know the meaning of the word tired. I had no idea there was an entire universe of experience beyond what I conventionally (read: pre-parenthood) understood tired to mean. I am coming off of a state of sleep deprivation incurred while my darling son woke on the average every three hours for ELEVEN SOLID MONTHS -- and that's on the average, mind you, some nights it was more like hourly -- and I can tell you that unless you've been there, you don't know from tired. And if you have been there, hats off to you my comrade! Come join me in this little corner of cyberspace and we'll take a nap together.

Now I'm the first to admit, I'm a bit of a suck when it comes to sleep. I'd be happy with nine hours, can make do with eight hours, am cranky and unmanageable with seven, and anything less than that just gets messy. I thought I had the parental sleep deprivation thing conquered with my first son... sure, we had to do the midnight feedings for the first couple of months, and there were days when we got up before the sun. In general, though, he slept a good twelve hours a night from about four months old, bless his little heart. And then came baby #2, who would wake up in the middle of the night because he was lonely, and would fall right back to sleep -- as long as I was holding his hand. How do you say no to someone who only wants to hold your hand? That's a good part of the reason why I kept him in a cradle at my bedside until he was eight months old and so big I had to cram him into it with a shoe-horn... at least I could stay in bed and keep him company at the same time. I also learned to nurse him in bed in pretty short order, as a baby who starts out at 10 lbs needs a lot of calories to make it through the dark hours, or so he insisted.

I'm happy to report that after suffering through a month of intermittent 'cry it out' with him, I think we have finally established a decent night-time routine. Well, decent inasmuch as I can cope at work with six hours of sleep if I have to. Now, if we can just eliminate the 5 am feeding, followed closely by the 5:45 am stumble through my morning ablutions, we might have a serviceable routine. Ah, how I remember fondly the days I used to need an alarm clock to wake me up...

I came out this weekend

True confessions time... I came out this weekend! Well, not that kind of coming out (not that there is anything wrong with that!) but I outed myself as a blogger to a few close friends and family members. I tell ya, what a relief to have my little closet obsession out in the open. Not only that, but I no longer have to rely on the kindness of strangers for acknowledgement and feedback -- I can bully people I know into leaving comments!!

It's been a little strange telling people who know me in real life about my blog. It's one thing to want as many strangers as troll the Internet to hear my meandering muses, another thing entirely to expose myself to people I have to make small-talk with at the dinner table.

The response to my confession fell into three separate and clearly defined camps. The girlfriends reacted with enthusiasm, encouragement and compliments, just like good girlfriends should. These are the kind of girls who would tell you that your butt looks great in that polka-dotted skirt left over from 1989, and could actually make it sound sincere.

The parents were a little bewildered as to why I might be compelled to go to all the trouble, and probably a little curious as to who would care to read the vagaries of my life as a mom, but they were nonetheless supportive as usual. My mom reacts the same way Beloved does to a lot of my little "projects" (read: obsessions du jour): with polite interest and a bit of a perplexed look on her face that pretty much says, "whatever makes you happy, dear."

The final reaction was from the geeks - my brother and an old friend who works in the tech industry (edited to add: who shall from now on be referred to as ÜberGeek, as he was unsatisfied with my original citation of him). I approached them with a little more caution, because being neither girlfriends nor my parents, nor sleeping in the same bed as me, they don't have the same obligation to be kind and complimentary that the previously mentioned audiences do. And, as I expected, they were a little less than supportive. Both rolled their eyes and snickered, and expressed that blogs are the domain of alienated and lovesick 14 year old girls, and political hacks. Well hell, it's no surprise to me that I am in touch with my inner alienated and lovesick 14 year old girl!

From the drawer -- So I'm late, right?

I remember reading once something about Stephen King. He said that he had a bunch of novels that had never been given to his publisher, and when times were lean (or, as I think the situation happened to be, he was so strung out on his addiction of choice that he couldn't produce) he would reach into his drawer and pull out something he had written eons ago and pass it off as his latest work.

I love this concept, and the reason I am a little sketchy on the details is because I read it long ago and yet it has stayed with me all these years.

Oh, and I should clarify that it's not so much that I am addled from substance abuse, but that I know blogs need to be updated frequently to be interesting and I've run out of things to say just now (stop snickering, even I shut up sometimes). So, in the interest of filling in the gaps, I would like to introduce into my blog the concept of "from the drawer." Plus, some of my fave pieces share exciting news in my life, like this one, and you get to know a little bit more about me. Isn't that cool?

Without further ado, here's one of my all-time faves from May 2003:

I'm late. Not like late for work, or late for a meeting (although that frequently happens) or late for dinner (although that rarely happens). I mean I'm late, like the big LATE, like, "Hmmmm, when DID I last have my period anyway?" And I can't believe that I don't actually know when my last period was. I have a vague idea, but I really am not sure if I am late, or if I just can't count.

Of course, I've been through this too many times before to get worked up about it. But I'm this irrepressible optimist, in case you haven't noticed. So when I figure I'm about three days late, I start to wonder. And I start to get a little bit obsessed with the toilet paper again. I find myself peeing when I don't really have a full bladder, just to check the TP. And then I find I'm really peeing all the time, and I'm not sure if it's psychological because I want to check the TP, or if I'm imagining things, and then one morning I remember that frequent urination is an early sign of pregnancy.

It's at that point that I start to get interested in my breasts, poor neglected things lying dormant since Tristan weaned himself in January. I find myself walking through the mall on the way home from work, trying to surreptitiously give myself a little squeeze to see if they're tender, which they are not. So I tell myself I'm being silly, and I wonder why I am compelled to do this in the mall, instead of say, my slightly more private bathroom at home.

Anyway, a couple more days go by, and I tell myself, "Okay, if no flow by Thursday, I'll take a test. I should definitely be late by Thursday." So then it occurs to me that if I want to take it on Thursday morning, I have to buy it on Wednesday. Now, after a couple years of struggling with infertility (blissfully ended by a successful IVF) I hate those freakin' tests. They seem to be a big red bulls-eye for the period police, and I'm really reluctant to actually buy one, as I am happy not knowing. As long as not proven otherwise, I'm still free to fantasize, right?

So I'm standing in the Shoppers Drug Mart, staring at the shelf of tests. And I don't want to buy one, because I have all these bitter, sad memories. I pick one up, I put it down. I pick up the two-pack, because it's more economical and I'm Scottish and Dutch and you don't get any cheaper than that. But I don't want that other test lying around to mock me after the first one comes up negative. So I walk out of the store. And then I walk back in, because the not-knowing is killing me. And I just buy the damn test to be done with it, and I hold it extra tight like a talisman. All the way home, I'm extremely conscious of the little bag beside me, like everyone can read the neon sign over my head, "Ha ha, look at this woman. She's infertile, and probably less than a week late, and she bought a pregnancy test! What a rube!"

So I'm watching the Sens game last night, and I start to play little games in my head. Like, if they get the goal, I'm pregnant. If they win the game, it's a sign, I'm pregnant. Beloved is teaching, so I'm all by myself, and damn if that isn't one of the best, most exciting hockey games I've ever seen! And all wrapped up in the anxiety of the game is my obsession with the little box on the end table. On my way to bed, I bring the test upstairs, and on the way past Tristan's room I stop in and touch the test to the top of his little head, for good luck.

So it's 4:45 am and Tristan has been sleeping poorly lately. I crawl back into bed after the latest soother insertion, and I have to pee but I don't want to pee yet because I want to use the first morning urine for the test. So I'm lying there, desperate to pee, trying to get back to sleep, and that's just not going to happen. So I give in. I tear open the box, and I'm taking a quick read of the instructions (it's been two years at least), doing the little "I've gotta pee" dance in my pre-dawn bathroom.

So I pee on the stick. And I remember all the negatives. And I remember my one positive, that ended in a miscarriage at 13 weeks. And I'm afraid to look, and I swear vengeance on the cruel soul that invented these blasted tests.

So I'm holding it in my hand, watching the liquid race across the little windows. There goes the test window. There goes the actual window.

Oh. My. God.

I'm pregnant!!!

Categories: infertility Simon

A picture of us

It took me an entire Saturday afternoon, a few false starts and more patience with technology than I thought I had, but I finally managed to install and run Hello photo-sharing software. Wanna see us? Here we are!



It's a pretty old picture by now (taken last June) but still one of my faves. One day I'll get a good pic of Beloved and put him on display, too.

What a whopper!

That’s what my grandfather said about me when he saw me for the first time – I was 8 lbs 14 oz or something to that effect. I can only imagine what he might have said when he saw my plump 10 lbs Simon for the first time.

I’m pleased to say that today at his one-year check-up, he has clawed his way back on to the curve at the 90th percentile for weight after being off the charts for the last couple of appointments. He’s a svelte 12.2 kilograms – that’s just shy of 27 lbs, if I did the math right – and at 77 cm (30 1/3 inches) tall, he’s in the 80th percentile for height. My other whopper, Tristan, was usually the other way around… 90th percentile for height but only 50th percentile for weight. We did that old wives’ tale thing, double his height at 2.5 years old to approximate his adult height, and he came in at 6’9”. Yikes!

A proud mommy moment today: as we were putting our coats and boots on to get out the door, Simon was sitting near the two steps that lead down from the hallway to our little foyer. After tumbling down the stairs a few times in his early mobility days, he has been pretty good about not attempting to get down the stairs himself. (Up the stairs to the bedrooms is another matter entirely – he can do it without missing a beat.) To my astonishment, I watched him tentatively stretch out a leg as he sat at the top of the stairs, test his weight, turn completely around and crawl backwards down the two stairs without any prompting or help from us. Now, crawling down the stairs may not seem like a major milestone, but we hadn’t been teaching him how to climb down yet – he figured it out on his own. My intrepid little adventurer, surprising me at every turn. (Edited to correct the boys names per the resolution of my identity crisis.)

Categories: Simon

I had comments!!!!

Okay, could I be any more of a dufus about this comment thing?

I had a stunning THREE comments in reply to my pathetic plea for them. THREE people -- can you believe it? And yet, if you look at the comment tags, yet AGAIN you will see a big fat zero. Do you know why? Cuz I got all techno-weenie again, and installed haloscan's funky comment and trackback code and when I did, it wiped out the previous comments. Did you hear the bloodcurdling "noooooooooooo" I let out just about the time I realized what I had done?

BUT...

I happened to have the previous version of my blog open in another browser window, and {insert triumphant "ta da" music here} I rescued my precious comments from oblivion!! So, without further ado, here are my three beloved comments, complete with reply from me:

4 Comments:
Dean Dad said...
You go, girl!
Gotta say, as an American Dad, the thought of a year of paid parental leave is unbelievably appealling. If it makes you feel any better, here it's 12 weeks, unpaid, and the guilt industry is just as strong anyway.Like the pseudonymns, too.
9:48 AM

hnk said...
I feel kind so I will left this small comment, I press "next blog " when I was looking at one of my friend's blog and I found your blog. the only way that make the people visit your blog is to visit their blog and left acomment so that they will visit your blog....like what you will do now ;-)
9:49 AM

ann said...
I love the name of your new blog.
"Postcards from the Mothership" is very funky!
Ann D
http://anndouglas.blogspot.com
The Mother of All Blogs
12:45 PM

DaniGirl said...
Holy crap, now THREE people have read my blog? This is the most exciting day in the history of the Internet for sure! At the risk of sounding a little Sally Field-ish, "You read me! You really read me!"I was so excited to find your (collective) comments that I called my Beloved, who has been amused if not a little mystified by my newfound blogging obsession.

Me, in near breathless excitement: "Guess what?"
Beloved, who has been through this enough times with me to respond with indulgent caution: "What?"
Me, beaming with pride: "THREE people read my blog."
Beloved, probably shaking his head and thinking it could be worse, "Congratulations. Can I go back to work now?"

Anyway, thanks for making my day!
Affectionately, Danigirl
1:21 PM

I love comments!!!!!

If you love Monty Python...

Am I the last Monty Python fan to find out about this? A friend just sent me the Newsweek review for Monty Python’s Spamalot, “A new musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” My only question? When on earth will I find the time and the resources to get myself to NYC?

Someone actually read my blog!

I’m feeling quite validated these days. Someone actually read my blog. Someone actually commented on my blog. S omeone looked at this self-indulgent little reflection on life, the universe and everything and took the time to say something about it. And it was a really nice something, too!

What, you say? You looked at all the comment tags, and there is a lovely fat “O” beside every one? Well, yes, but I can explain. The comment is on my other blog. The one that looks just like this one, but has a different URL. No, really, it exists, it really does!

You see, when I first started, I appropriated the term “SnackMommy” from my wickedly funny friend Ashley in Winnipeg, who regales us lucky few with the ongoing adventures of SnackMommy and the Hot Nanny. I love these epistles so much that I want to write a book of short stories some time, pilfering not only her content but her razor-sharp humour as well. So when I started a blog, SnackMommy was just the tone I wanted to set. Then, after a few days, I got a case of the guilties and started wondering if Ashley might want to keep that URL for herself, since she did come up with it and all. However, Ashley was incommunicado, being a good little Snowbird and touring the happiest place on earth with her three-year-old. All this to say, after a weekend of reflection I decided that both “momm-eh” and “postcards from the mothership” were close seconds and good enough for me.

After trolling the help section of blogger for not very long, I decided the easiest way to move my blog from SnackMommy to momm-eh was to basically cut and paste, entry by entry. Took a while, but by manipulating the time stamp I got the whole thing pretty much exactly as it was on the first site. Smug and thinking myself quite the little techie, I figured I was ahead of the game. I hadn’t told anybody about my old blog, let alone my new blog, and SnackMommy could retire in peace. I took one final scan to make sure I hadn’t missed anything – and noticed a comment!!! I had commented on someone’s blog, and she dropped by and left a comment on my blog – but alas, the wrong blog.

So, I have my first official comment, and yet I do not. Typical for me, who never manages to do anything the easy way. So, if you are feeling kind, please leave me a little comment so I can at least get back to where I started from. And if you are feeling unkind, feel free to move along!

Back to work blues

My first day back to work after my 13-month maternity leave was Monday January 24. Did you happen to catch the headlines that day? January 24 is apparently the most depressing day of the year. No guff, like I needed the international media to spell that one out for me.

As if the “most depressing day of the year” thing weren’t enough salt in my wound, there’s been a lot of talk about a national system of funded day care in Canada lately. Not so bad in itself, but it gets all the crackpots writing their letters to the editor about the evils of child care, and how government funding for child care is, according to one letter-writer in the print version of yesterday’s Ottawa Citizen “nothing more than a publicly funded child abandonment program.” Sigh. Not that I give any credence to what strangers generalize about my personal experiences, but it still stings.

You know how you never notice how many people drive white cars until you buy a white car? Maybe its because I’m a little bristly on the subject of day care these days, but I keep finding these things. I’m not looking for them, I swear. This is actually a bit out of the Citizen’s science blog (of all things) - another set of rants that I really shouldn’t let under my skin. He says in 27 years of journalism he never got so much hate mail as the day he defended the idea of mothers in the workforce. What decade is this, anyway? And a Globe and Mail article from yesterday says more kids are in day care now than ever before.

All this to say, I’m already feeling crappy about being back at work and the media seems to be inordinately interested in making me feel even more crappy than I already do. All things being equal, of course I would prefer to stay home with my kids. Actually, in a perfect world, I’d work three days a week, get paid for double that, and have the metabolism of a hamster. Sigh.

Time travel

I saw this on Ann Douglas' blog (the Mother of All Blogs) and thought it was a nice way to introduce myself.

15 years ago today I would have been:
... in year one of my "practice" marriage
... living with my (now ex) in-laws, looking for an apartment
... just about to start my first job with the government (yikes, just realized that would have made me basically unemployed and homeless!)

10 years ago today I would have been:
... happily single and living in a rented room in a house with two other women
... in year 3 of my 6 year quest to get my degree in Communications by studying part-time
... planning my solo tour of Europe for later that summer
... about one month shy of meeting Beloved for the first time
... working for the government, resolving client enquiries and complaints

5 years ago today I would have been:
... just about to get my referral to the fertility clinic after 10 months of unsucessful TTC
... working in headquarters of the same government department managing a national program
... taking a night course in woodworking at the local college

1 year ago today I would have been:
... mommy to a two year old boy (thanks to IVF) and a one-week old boy (a wonderful surprise)
... a hormonal, sleep-deprived, post-partum disaster
... looking forward to a year of paid 'vacation' - being a mom in Canada rocks!

This year I am:
... blissfully happy mommy to a three year old and a one year old
... a communications advisor for the same department
... a little overwhelmed by being a working mommy

Today I:
... am at work and will get to it shortly
... will have a long evening with the boys as Beloved teaches tonight
... will probably order pizza for dinner

Next year I hope:
... to be a senior communications advisor
... to be registering my eldest for school
... to be thinking about what to do with my little "frosty" (frozen embryo)

In five years I hope:
... to have both boys in school full time
... that maybe there is a little girl in the picture somewhere
... to be independently wealthy -- where is that lottery ticket of mine?

Categories: memes

You are one!

Happy Birthday, beautiful boy!! A year ago you joined us. You did not want to come out. You were ten days late and still you defied 24 hours of medical inducements before you changed your mind. After days and hours of stubborn resistance, however, once you set your mind to coming out, you wanted to come out NOW and there was no slowing you down. You are truly your mother’s boy, you know. You fired yourself down the birth canal so quickly that despite the fact I was in labour for an entire day, your head was as round as a cherub’s. Just three, maybe four, pushes and out you came with your little fist clenched and held over your head in victory. Ouch.

Frankie, do you know how much you have changed my life? Do you have any idea of the gifts that you and your brother make of every single day? The transition from no baby to one baby in life is obviously a huge change, but who would have guessed that the change from one to two would be just as, perhaps even more, traumatic – and eventually, jubilant.

Every day with you has been a lesson that two siblings are not two of the same child. Just when I thought I had at least the basics of mothering a baby down pat, you came along and showed me I still had a lot to learn. You were easier to nurse but a terrible sleeper. You did not want to sleep through the night, and you especially did not want to sleep alone. You vocally and even tearfully preferred me to any other human being for the first few months, and I was secretly flattered and pleased, although it wore a little thin after a while. You were hungry, hungry, hungry and you pulled milk out of me like you were drawing it not from me but through me, as if I were a straw that dowsed the milk from the very air. And you grew, my little baby. You started out a whopper at ten pounds, and you were off the charts from the word go. Mama don’t raise no tiny babies in this house.

You have the most wonderful way of scrunching up your face when you smile. We call it your “scary baby” face, and it is so adorable my heart soars just thinking about it. You are a mischievous soul, and I call you “pesky baby” as you move from one source of trouble to another. No coffee cup may rest on a table, no stray piece of paper may remain within reach, no heat register shall remain unexamined in your quest to discover all the universe’s secrets. You love to remove things from containers. I have given up on refolding the tea towels, aprons and oven mitts before I put them back into the drawer you empty four, five and six times a day. You love to put things into containers, and you do not take kindly to me preventing you from putting bits of food from your high-chair tray back into the bowl I am feeding you from. You love to hold something in your hand with your arm outstretched and flex your wrist back and forth, and I love to watch you do it.

You don’t really speak yet. You have mimicked the musical sound of “uh oh”, but I haven’t heard the words pronounced. You don’t quite walk yet, although you do “cruise” the furniture, and just last Sunday you decided to walk across the living room while holding on to your little walker toy. And you even did it while Daddy had a video camera near at hand, you clever boy! You can crawl like nobody’s business, and you can get to the top of the stairs so quickly that you’ve nearly given me several heart attacks.

You are incredibly tolerant of your older brother as he snatches things from you, pokes, pulls and shoves you and even rides you like a pony. We tell him to be careful, because we bet that one day you will be the ‘bigger’ brother and he’ll be sorry. Just this weekend, you both set your sights on the same truck and for the first time you would not relinquish it to him. We’re in trouble now! It makes me giddy with joy to think that I get to spend the rest of my life watching you two grow up together, to think that I have created brothers.

There are simply not enough words to tell you how much I love you, to tell you how happy you make me, to tell you what a difference you make in the world.

Happy birthday, beautiful boy!

Categories: Simon

Your invitation to a party in my head

So now that I’ve committed to this, I find myself wondering why. As in, why am I compelled to do this?

Do you remember that scene in The Breakfast Club, where Ally Sheedy’s character dumps her purse on the couch? Well, this is my invitation to you to see all the crap that I carry around inside my heart and head. I’m an exhibitionist, I admit it. I love to complete those e-mail questionnaire thingees that everyone claims to hate but everyone seems to forward anyway. (What did you have for dinner? What is under your bed? What is your favourite inane question?) For goodness sake, I dragged Beloved onto the flippin’ CBC to discuss our infertility issues on national television. So when the opportunity arises to have a soap-box in my own little corner of cyberspace, how could I resist?

But ya gotta be careful. Frankie is not really the name of my darling one-year old son, neither is Luigi the name of my gorgeous and brilliant almost-three year old. Just about any name you come across here could be real or fictitious, although I do promise not to make stuff up just to entertain you. Well, if I do make it up, I’ll be sure to let you know – fair enough?

Today’s parental angst:
What to do about birthday parties? With one just past and one in less than a month, I’m agonizing on whether to spend what I don’t have to entertain a bunch of kids I don’t necessarily like for a party that my kids probably won’t remember once they are in grade school. So why do I care? Why do I feel so guilty about having a relatively big party for Luigi's first birthday, and a small but still lovely family gathering for Frankie? Why am I worried about a party for a bunch of three year olds? Poor Luigi, last year he spent his birthday yakking his guts out with a day-long stomach flu – he’d probably be happy with a birthday that doesn’t involve barfing. I don’t have the time, the brain cells or the cash to do it like I want to, so should I do it at all?

OMG, I'm a blogger!

Okay, so I’ve been reading about blogs for quite some time now. At first, the idea was quaintly geeky, which of course immediately appealed to me. But aside from generally knowing what they were, and stumbling across a few here and there, I never really realized what a universe unto themselves blogs have become.

So I started really thinking about it. To blog or not to blog? Note the insecurity in each of the questions I pondered: Am I funny enough to blog? (because if I don’t have humour then I don’t really have anything at all.) Does anyone really care what I have to say? What would I talk about? What if nobody reads my blog? What if somebody reads my blog? And the real biggie: do I have the resources to commit to a blog right now? Well, the last one is the only one I can answer right now. Since I’m back at work for the first time in a year, I can at least probably find an hour or so a week (on my lunch hour, bien sûr!) For the record, it took me about 15 alt+ combinations before I could get that û accent right.

If I could just type instead of editing and playing and getting lost in the friggin’ thesaurus I could probably do this in about half the time. If I only had an attention span…

So what would I blog about? Well, my kids of course. What else is there of significance in my universe? So does the world really need another soccer-mom wanna-be sending dispatches from suburbia, trying to strike a voice somewhere between Erma Bombeck, Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Cosby, but in the 21st century, not Jewish, not male and not black? And potentially not really funny?

Well, why the hell not?

So here we go. I’m so self-conscious as I type away, wondering if you are rolling your eyes at me or thinking cruel thoughts about my writing skills or (worst of all) have completely lost interest and have not even made it this far. What if I install a hit counter and I have to spend all my free time hitting refresh so it looks like somebody is reading my blog?

So if you really want to know what floats my boat, here’s some cool stuff I found this week:

The first blog I ever found worthy of bookmarking: http://baconandehs.blogspot.com/ Canadian and funny - what more do you want?

BAD COMMA A wonderfully snobby and pretentious New Yorker article that picks out all the grammatical errors in the hot bestseller on grammatical errors, Eats Shoots and Leaves. (Yes, I am just the kind of geek who loves that stuff.)

So, are you still reading? Should I publish this, or banish it to bad-idea heaven?

Ah, what the hell. Here we go!

Categories: blogging