Must be doing something right

Every so often, one is the witness/recipient of such a run of Behaviour that one is tempted to pull out one’s fingernails, just for the welcome distraction the pain might bring

You know, those days when every utterance out of a child’s mouth is a version of, “I didn’t want you to do that, and you did it wrong, too.” When every action is the equivalent of them stealing your last bite of pie, only to spit it out because it’s yucky. When they insist that the best way to show their love for you is to crash into you full speed while braying like a donkey and laughing hysterically at your bruises. When it’s all you can do to excuse yourself quietly from the room, hide behind a locked door, rub your temples and breathe and count the minutes until bedtime and the reprieve from the banshees who have taken over the household.

And then — and then — one happens upon a tableau such as this:

And, just in case you thought it was a fluke, this:

Yes, that is the big one reading stories to the little one. By reading, I mean a mixture of memorization (he’s sort of the human equivalent of a Kindle, what with all those books he's got stored in his head) and actual, sounding-out-the-letters-to-make-a-word reading. And the little one, formerly hostile, is now rapt, in awe of books, taking my hand and pulling me to the shelf to find Sandra Boynton's Doggie Book or one of DK Media’s thousand-plus books about trucks. His new favourite sentence (after, “Mommy go get it”): “I want to read.”

And now, in addition to saying yes, we can also say, “Go ask your brother.”

Makes up for a lot, that.

To sleep, perchance to dream

So, we finally told Isaac to go suck it. Seriously, I looked it up in the sleep training books and those are the exact words they use. Right there on page 37, Dr. Richard Ferber and Dr. Marc Weissbluth and even Mrs. Elizabeth Pantley of No Cry Sleep Solution fame all told us to tell Isaac to go suck it. At least, that’s what I’m fairly sure they said when I racked my brains for how we handled tumultuous nighttimes in the past. Suck it, baby.

Okay, so we didn’t quite use those exact words. More a lot of “Night night” and “Back to bed, Isaac” and “No, cuddles all gone” and “Time for bed.” Forty-five minutes’ worth of that on the first night, 30 minutes on the second, 15 on the third night, two on the fourth, and then — none. Maybe half a protest squawk and off to sleep. Textbook.

And, you know, not perfect sleep. Not necessarily all through the night, every night. Still some ridiculously early mornings. But, all things considered, much improved sleep. Even better, we have our evenings back. Instead of lying next to a squirming toddler until 9 PM each night, the resentment creeping in through the holes worn through my good attitude, I am free by about 7:30, often earlier. There’s a new regime in the house: dinner at 5:30, bath at six, reading stories in bed by seven, lights out shortly after. And then: grown-up time! (Excuse me while I go French kiss Dr. Marc W. on my way to watching Mad Men with Rachel.)

All this extra sleep, plus a weekend away, plus the reacquisition of my evenings, has made me downright giddy. The kids, too. I mean, there’s nothing like two extra hours of sleep a night for the toddler mood. The four-year-old — who now starts off the night in our bed, and is then moved to the “spare” room — also seems to be benefiting. Good moods abound around here, aided in no small part by sunshine and warmer weather.

This morning, I woke up before Isaac woke up, woke up to sunlight, got up with him at the downright civilized hour of 6:15. By 7:15, both kids were up and fed and happy. By 7:30, the four of us were piled into our bed, Rachel and I bookending some thumb-sucking, blanket-toting, footed-pajama-wearing, squirming little chatty boys who competed to kiss our faces. As Rowan read a copy of Today’s Parent to Isaac (“Dat baby. Dat more baby.” “Isaac! Look! Another baby!”), Rachel looked at me across the tops of their heads and said, “This is what I thought it would be like.”

Green intentions

Happy Earth Day! To celebrate, Rowan rode his bike all the way to the babysitter’s this morning. That’s the equivalent of approximately two city blocks, but it’s the furthest he's ever gone at a stretch. What a difference a year makes. Last summer, Rowan on his bike was the equivalent of the kid picking flowers in the soccer field, all on, off, on, off, don’t let go of the handlebars Mom hey what’s that shiny thing on the ground I’m tired can you push me let’s take the car. Today, he pedaled along steadily. “My bike has magic powers to go over cracks,” he told us, repeatedly. “That's why I'm so good.”

Rachel and I just grinned like idiots. Way back when, before there were children and we had only visions of what children might be like and what astonishing kinds of parents we would be, we both imagined our kids riding bikes. We imagined walking or cycling to school or daycare beside our bike-riding kids. (We actually imagined cycling beside our bike-riding kids as we made our way across, say, the Netherlands, or down the West Coast from Victoria to San Francisco, but I may be getting ahead of myself.)

And today, I got to check that vision off my mental list — always nice when those come to fruition instead of falling by the wayside (“And they will not eat cheese strings”).

My celebrations of Earth Day will continue for the next hour and a half, while Rachel takes both children to Kindermusik and I get my biweekly extra 90 minutes to myself. I have this vision where I will do yoga and some journal/creative writing and screw around on Facebook.

A Passover/Easter fable

Once upon a time, there were two small boys. And their mothers took them from their small town, where the water was not fluoridated, on a small airplane, to (as the larger of the small boys put it) The Land of Toronto, where for two nights in a row they attended enormous family dinners, during which they ran around like madmen with their cousins and ate untold amounts of sugar and watched cable television shows like American Idol and had vast quantities of fun and fell into bed at 10 p.m. without even brushing their teeth they (and their mothers) were so tired and full of glee.

They also drove all around the Land of Toronto, having adventures that involved dinosaurs and subway trains and mud puddles and several of their mothers’ Old Stomping Grounds. And it was good.

Then they went to The Small Town of Guelph, where they ate untold quantities of chocolate Easter eggs and had large family dinners and ran around like madmen with their cousins and stayed up very late watching (appropriately) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The children, though generally delightful, coped with the travel and the influx of sugar and the lack of sleep and the media by occasionally throwing tantrums in the presence of older relatives and eating lots of cheese strings. Their mothers coped by drinking lots of wine. Mostly, they tried to be good parents, which involved, in part, requiring the small boys to brush their teeth after two nights of not.

They took out the small boys’ toothpaste and toothbrushes, whereupon the small boys’ auntie wondered aloud why the mothers were letting the small boys use fluoridated toothpaste.

The mothers explained that the water in their small town was not fluoridated, and that their family doctor had suggested that they use said toothpaste to compensate.

The auntie again wondered out loud why the mothers were letting the small boys use fluoridated toothpaste.

The mothers again explained that the water in their small town was not fluoridated, and that their family doctor had suggested that they use said toothpaste to compensate.

The auntie again began to wonder out loud why the mothers were letting the small boys use fluoridated toothpaste, but stopped herself midsentence when she realized that she was critiquing other people’s parenting and apologized for doing so.

Just then, the larger of the two small boys walked into the room and, for no apparent reason, bonked the smaller of the two small boys on the head. The smaller boy began to cry. The larger boy left the room.

There followed an uncomfortable silence.

Then the auntie said, “Well, maybe if you didn’t let them use fluoridated toothpaste, they wouldn’t be so violent.”

When preschoolers hand you lemons...

Look what my girlfriend made!

I would say she just whipped it up in the midst of a particularly chaotic Saturday afternoon, but “whipped it up” would imply effortlessness, and this baby was a bit of a palaver. The making, chilling, and rolling out of the dough. The — literal and figurative — lemon squeezing involved in making the filling. The separating of eggs, the beating of egg whites into meringue. The assembly. The baking.

All told, it was a marathon of a pie. Rachel kept apologizing for attempting such a complex feat of baking on a weekend day, with children underfoot. Rangy, rangy, rangy children. “If I’d known it was going to be so much work,” she kept saying, “I never would’ve started this.”

Which kind of sums up how I was feeling about having kids right at that particular moment. Our morning had consisted of a series of tantrums, from adults and children alike, culminating in a tear-stained Rowan running down the driveway just as I was about to put the car in gear, screaming, “I am too going to the maaaaaaaaaaaarket!”

Minutes earlier, of course, he had refused to get into the vehicle, declaring loudly and repeatedly that under no circumstances was he going to the market. Rachel had finally thrown up her hands in disgust and gone back in the house with him, while I and a blinking Isaac, already in his car seat, were left outside. For a brief, shining moment I thought that Isaac and I might have a sweet little date together, sans four-year-old attitude. In the end, I strapped Rowan in, fed him a banana, did some deep breathing, and braved the public with both children, leaving Rachel at home for a blessed hour or two to stare at the wall or do Sudokus or drink herself silly — whatever she needed. She reciprocated that afternoon when I strapped Isaac into the stroller and wandered around the neighbourhood for an hour or two, listening to This American Life on my iPod. As I left, Rachel and Rowan were arguing about whether he could or could not stick his fingers in the mixing bowl while the electric beaters were running.

When I returned, Rachel and Rowan had reached some sort of truce. They had managed, together, to get the pie into and out of the oven. Then they played chase in the basement and read books. The kitchen was spotless. And this beauty was cooling on the counter — cloudy layers just obscuring the sunny sweetness underneath.

Unravelling

I can’t knit any more. Too many decades of constant computer use have left me with repetitive strain disorders and carpal tunnel syndrome. From my fingertips to my shoulders, I’m essentially a train wreck, a bundle of tingling nerves and sulky muscles that rebel any time I type more than a few sentences or click my way through too many Etsy pages.

I’ve compensated by turning to voice dictation software, ergonomic mice and keyboards, a yoga ball instead of a chair, and by practicing certain forms of restraint. Like making the decision to stay away from online Boggle’s siren call. And giving up knitting.

It’s been a sacrifice, especially for someone who has a tiny bit of a problem with compulsion. Basically, I’m a productivity junkie. I like to keep busy, and I find it difficult to watch television without also doing something “useful” — a character trait of mine that Rachel barely puts up with (“When I watch television, I want to ... watch ... television,” she will say, when I suggest that we could fold a couple of loads of laundry while catching up on season three of Weeds.). Knitting was a perfect way for me to quell the voices while getting in good-quality bad-television time.

Mostly, I have come to accept the fact that my knitting career is over, although every so often I think that maybe I can find some small way to jump back on the craft bandwagon. So when my friend Judy, who has of late been indulging — beautifully, heartbreakingly beautifully — her own knitting and felting obsession, mentioned that she was going to repurpose a couple of hand-knit sweaters into felted mittens, I offered to unravel them for her. If I couldn’t knit something, I figured, I could un-knit something and make myself useful.

I made that suggestion on a Sunday morning, at Judy’s house, where my family had descended upon hers for our standing brunch date. I was thrilled to be there, mostly because being there meant that I wasn’t at home on a frigid morning corralling increasingly edgy children.

Or maybe I’m the one who’s edgy. Lately, I’ve been finding Rowan more challenging than I usually do: chalk it up to some combination of bronchitis (his and mine), PMS (mine), defiance (his), and a general ranginess, but I’m not exhibiting all the qualities that I would like to exhibit as a parent in terms of patience, modelling appropriate behaviour, and the like. Midway through the weekend, I had nearly had it, and the prospect of French toast at Judy and her partner, Jill’s, house was exactly what I needed.

We came home from brunch with a sweater. Isaac napped, Rowan watched a video, Rachel read, and I sat at the dining room table blissfully picking out the sweater seams. The day passed, more or less a study in average parenting skills and equally average four-year-old behaviour. Before bedtime, I sat on the couch with Rachel and Rowan as she read stories to him and I unravelled a sleeve.

“What are you doing?” he asked me.

I explained my project to him.

“Can I do it?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, passing him the sleeve.

And we sat together in silence for a good 15 minutes, working together, him pulling the yarn intently, me winding it around itself into a ball — our own little prayer service (I asked for more patience and more parental grace) at the Church of Craft.

Changing constellations …

On the last day of our visit to Toronto in December, I had some time to kill and an energetic child to entertain, so I took Rowan to the billiards room in my father’s new condominium building, and we shot some stick.

I haven’t played pool regularly since my undergrad days in Montréal, when my roommate, Lori, and I lived across the street from a bar unfortunately named the Copacabana. We and the rest of the theatre crowd became regulars, ordering happy-hour specials of two half-pints of St. Ambroise and other Québec microbrews before such things were fashionable, and playing dollar-a-game pool for hours at a time.

Eventually, I got good enough that I could occasionally run the table for a few games at a time, sometimes even winning against long-time regulars like the musclebound guy with the mullet we nicknamed Fabio. It got so that I would drop in for a couple of games most days after class. We got quite chummy with the owners, Alberto and Albino, who would occasionally unlock the table and let us play for free. Alberto even deigned to lend me his custom cue, stored in the supply cupboard. One spring day, shortly after graduation, Lori and I dropped in for a beer during lunchtime, and two middle-aged Portuguese gentleman, friends of Alberto’s, challenged us to a game. Much to everyone’s surprise, we won handily — I’d like to think by banking the eight ball at some difficult angle — and they bought us a couple of rounds.

Oh yeah, I was a hustler. (Now stop laughing.)

Much has changed since my Copa days.

Not just the setting — trade seedy bar on the Main for genteel condominium residence at Lawrence and Bathurst, for one. Or the company. Or the fact that I’m no longer that constantly heartsick young thing, personal soundtrack set to one of ani difranco’s angry albums — the one who lost too many games because she was too worried about people watching her to keep her eye entirely on the ball.

Or the rules. I used a cue to try to sink balls; Rowan used just his hands to whiz them across the felt and into the pockets. He did not take turns. He did not wait for me to line up shots. He took balls out of pockets and put them in others, knocking them into each other and out of my sightlines. I took shots more or less randomly, lining things up as best I could and hitting the cue ball before I was sure, before everything inevitably shifted in front of my eyes. Every time Rowan sunk a ball, he crowed, “I won!” And every time I managed to get one in despite the chaos of the table, he was equally supportive: “You won! Good job, Susan!”

In short, a microcosm of life with children. We had a blast. I can’t wait to do it again, and I can’t wait to visit him and his brother when they are cocky, twenty-something pool hustlers, and play a few games over a couple of pints of local microbrew, wherever that may be.

Pride and joy

Lest you think that bronchitis has brought out the best in my children, I thought I would share a little fantasy (and, I stress, it’s a fantasy) I’ve been harbouring of late:

You know those Wild Kingdom, National Geographic–kind of TV shows, the ones with long shots of the animals on the African veldt, the elephants trumpeting and the gazelles leaping and the lions stalking the gazelles?

Eventually, they always cut to a shot of the lions lolling about, full after the kill, with the cubs wrestling in the dirt around their parents. And eventually one cub or another gets a bit too close or a bit too uppity or refuses to put on its snowsuit and the mother lion half snarls and picks up her heavy paw and whacks the cub sideways with it.

And the cub rolls off, ass over teakettle (I fear I’m mixing metaphors here, but what the hey). If there were a sound effect it would be from a cartoon, and it would go something like i-bid-ee-i-bid-ee-ib-ib-ib-i. And the cub eventually comes to a stop and gets to its feet and shrugs and shakes itself off and goes back to playing, but with JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE RESPECT.

Until the next time.

Sometimes, thinking about that is what gets me through the next five minutes.

Plan B

Sunday was one of those days, those middle days of the long weekend when you realize you have no plan and that you desperately need one. When you wake up at 3 p.m. from your 20-minute nap (also desperately needed) because the baby has woken up from his, scoop him out of his crib and carry him to the basement, where your spouse is watching your nearly-four-year-old son bounce off the walls in his underpants, and start racking your brain for something to do in the four hours until bedtime.

What we came up with was the farm. One of the several hobby/working farms in the area that offers up fall pumpkin festivals — hay rides, petting zoos, haunted pumpkin patches, ponies, candy apples, hot dogs, and so forth. We piled into the car (after changing Isaac, sticking sweatpants on Rowan’s resistant little stick legs, throwing snacks and diapers and camera and hats into a bag and a stroller into the trunk) and headed out.

This particular farm is about a 25-minute drive from our house, past the airport, past the pulp and paper mill, into the last of the fall colours and the hopes of seeing wildlife. Isaac kicked his legs happily in his car seat while Rowan kept up a steady chatter about petting bunnies and hay mazes. Then the two of them started their yelling game, where they shrieked back and forth to each other, with increasing hilarity, until Rowan abruptly fell asleep. We kept Isaac content by putting in a CD at low volume and passing the occasional grape back toward him; he also found a stash of stale Goldfish crackers that no one ever bothered to clean out of his car seat, and munched on those for a while. And Rachel and I chatted all the rest of the way to the farm, through the gates, and up to the 15-year-old girls who told us they were closing in 45 minutes — although we were welcome to pay our $21 and go ahead. Perfect. We turned around, Rowan still sleeping, Isaac staring contentedly out his window, and chatted and enjoyed the fall colours all the way home. Rowan opened his eyes as we pulled into the driveway. “Where are we?” he asked. “Where’s the farm?”

It was, as the writer Anne Lamott writes, “like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony.” We needed to get out. And we didn’t need to be any place else but where we were.

Cycle path

Maybe it was the German couple (him from the East, her from the West) Rowan and I met in the park a couple of weeks ago, cycling across Canada with their two-year-old daughter. They had two fully loaded bikes — front and back panniers, more gear neatly bungeed on top of racks, handlebar bags — and they were towing their toddler in a single Chariot carrier. With a child’s bike strapped to the top of it. They had started in from Vancouver, and, over the course of four months, made it through the Prairies and into Thunder Bay. Now, they were trying to decide whether to take the (very) non-scenic logging road up to Armstrong and catch the Via Rail train to Toronto, or risk the heavy traffic and narrow shoulders of the TransCanada on their bikes to catch the gorgeous views of Lake Superior.

I wish I had known to tell them to cycle Superior, cross the border at Sault Ste. Marie, and take the Amtrak to the Big Smoke. Whatever they decided, I hope they made it to Toronto in time to catch their flight home. They plan to return to Canada next summer and pick up where they left off, cycling to the easternmost point of Newfoundland.

I can barely tow Isaac and a diaper bag up a hill in our double Chariot without getting lightheaded.

But I digress.

Maybe it was the German couple (did I mention they spoke perfect English?) that sparked Rowan’s interest in his bike, the one my father bought for him in June and that has remained in the garage, mostly untouched, since then. But two weeks ago, he asked to get it out and cycle to our weekly brunch at Judy and Jill’s.

(Another digression: Did you know that, for the past year, Rowan and Isaac’s godmothers, Judy and Jill, have had us and our children over for brunch every Sunday morning? As in, just when we realize that the weekend is — depending on your perspective — already half over or only half over and Sunday stretches before us like this great yawning chasm of time in which to keep children happy and occupied, we are treated to coffee and muffins and eggs and back bacon and blueberries and two adults who dote on — and entertain — our children. It’s heavenly. Just in case you didn’t know that.)

So, the bike. If Rowan were cycling across Canada, he would take a lot longer than four months, because:

a) he can’t steer and would probably end up in either Montana or the Yukon
b) he tends to get off his bike every 10 feet or so to examine more closely a pothole or a rock or a tree
c) midway through each trip, he decides he’d rather walk, leaving me to push his bike along, the equivalent of leaving it somewhere in Saskatoon.

Still, we persist, because my theory is that, for Rowan (for anyone, really), any and all bike time is good. The more he pedals, the further he goes, the better he’ll get and the more he’ll enjoy cycling. So I walk along beside him, holding the handlebars gently and lifting my hands when he’ll let me (“Hold on, Mama! You need to hold on!”), urging him to LOOK WHERE YOU’RE GOING, adding to his forward momentum, and waiting as he pops off to explore again and again. “Ready to hop back on?” I’ll ask after a few moments. And sometimes he does, and we set off again.

For Rowan, cycling is so completely about the journey and not the destination that there’s no point in being anything but patient and accommodating. And besides, I’m loving it. I love watching my kid ride a bike, love walking or jogging beside him holding the handlebars, love letting go, love the idea that one day, we might ride our bikes together. I love how riding his bike seems to make Rowan more attentive to the outside world.

And I love being around to hear him say things like, “Mama, if you get me a basket for my bike, I can put flowers in it.”