Magic wand, repaired

We went to a birthday party last night, an offshoot of the weekly kids’ soccer game that has become our latest mainstay. Each Tuesday evening, several families gather in the lower field of a nearby schoolyard, children and potluck snacks and water bottles and bicycles and picnic blankets in tow. J’s four children drag their nets across the street and down the field. M brings a bag full of purple and yellow cloth strips that the kids tie around their heads or their waists to indicate their teams. L brings an entire watermelon, sliced. T blows his whistle and get the kids to line up by height, somersault across the field, give him 10 push-ups to warm up. S, who lives across the street, is the default bathroom stop for kids who just can’t hold it. At least one toddler eventually ends up naked. The little girls get hot and strip off their T-shirts; boys show up in pretty dresses if that’s what they feel like today.

There is a game of sorts, and then a break, and then a kids-against-grown-ups game, and then eventually we all scrape our children together, pluck them from the trees and the hills and the sidewalks, and make our way home, past bedtime and worth every minute of it.

Last night, J’s younger son turned eight, and the soccer game expanded to include tables and a potluck dinner, candles and cake, three-legged races and stomp-the-balloon and garbage-bag crawls and a cup-decorating station and the birthday boy high on contraband Fun-Dip. Grown-ups picked up broken balloon pieces and swung random children through the air. One child wondered aloud if there was an extra piece of birthday cake for him, and his dad indicated an abandoned half-slice on a plate on the ground: “Go ahead and have that one,” he said. “It doesn’t look like anyone is eating it.” And I thought: My kind of people.

Just as all the tables were set up, all the food spread out, the canopy stretched over top, we saw two police officers slow down and then stop their car across the street, open the doors and climb out and make their way, slowly, towards us. And I thought, Oh come on. Do we need a permit? Are they going to shut us down? Can’t we just gather in the park for a picnic without the cops arriving?

And one of the officers said, “We’re looking for a little girl who’s gone missing.” And I felt a rush of shame. Were all the kids here — all the girls — present and accounted for? No one extra? “Her name’s Angelica,” said the officer. “Apparently she comes here to play sometimes.” And we all scanned the field, picking out our own children and everyone else’s, hoping to spot one more girlish body in the mix. She wasn’t there.

The cops left. We returned to our festivities, the mood picking up fairly quickly in spite of it all. Games were played, cake eaten, new balloons tied around ankles and sweaters donned in the fading light. J brought a bag of tiny gifts for the kids, including a roster of fairy wands with pink ribbons tied around them. I found Rowan, perched in the lower branches of a crabapple tree, surrounded by children, and handed him one. “What is it?” he asked. “Your magic wand,” I told him, and he was into it immediately, shouting “Alakazam! I’m turning you into a turtle!” all the way home.

Of course, magic wands in the hands of four-year-olds are delicate proposition, and so I’ve Scotch-taped this one back together. Given its provenance, I’m fairly certain there’s still magic in it. Fingers crossed for enough magic in the world to make sure Angelica is safe.

Forty years in the desert was enough

If Rachel and I ever split up, you just know that the next person she gets involved with will like to camp. Why, why, why, she’ll ask her new love, as they lie next to each other on their Thermarests, gazing out of the mesh door of their tent, which will be pitched in the belly of some provincial park or other, Why, why, why did I spend all those years with someone who never appreciated all this?

Here’s a (not-so) secret: I don’t really like camping. I’ll put up with it for a few days, here and there, for the greater good, but I never really got the point of it. I mean, I like nature and all, but I don’t really feel the need to sleep in the middle of it. Or cook, for that matter: I have a perfectly functioning stove right in my house, along with a bed. And oh, this crazy little thing called a toilet.

A lot of my camping aversion has to do with sleep. As in, I can’t — at least, not lying in a tapered, zippered, sleeping bag, with only an inch of foam and between me and the hard, hard ground, my folded fleece acting as a pillow, the whine of a thousand bloodthirsty mosquitoes droning in my ears. Sleep, as anyone who reads this blog regularly will know, is important to me, perhaps because it does not come easily to me at the best of times. And I am loath to squander it for the purported benefits of “getting away from it all” in the wilderness. One of the last times Rachel and I camped, I was five months’ pregnant with Rowan, which gave me the leverage to insist that we purchase an air mattress (along with a nifty little pump that you can plug into your car’s cigarette lighter). And now, when we camp, we camp on a mattress, outfitted with sheets, duvet, and pillows. Two of them, for me. Because I need two pillows to sleep. (Actually, in a perfect world, I also like a third pillow, just hold on to, but I’m willing to sacrifice this perk for the sake of “outdoorsiness” and keeping things simple.)

I also like earplugs, and an eye mask, to filter out the sunrise. And then I like to drink tea, with milk in it, as soon as possible after waking up. I’m becoming one of those people who contemplates traveling with my own pillows. In other words, I’m getting older, and it’s clear I’m not mellowing with age in the sleep department.

Here’s another thing: I feel ugly when I camp. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but it’s the truth. I have hair that really does require a certain amount of product to look halfway decent, hair that, when faced with humidity and lake water and left to dry of its own accord, frizzes out into an unattractive pyramid. And I don’t tan, either. Camping, sans product and styling aids, I begin to resemble a yeti. There’s Rachel, of the fine, straight, blonde hair, getting progressively cuter and browner and silkier with each passing hour, while I grow into a Brillo-headed, mosquito-bitten, grouchy little mess. Oh, and did I mention I am prone to heat rashes? And that Rachel could sleep on a pile of rocks?

Aesthetic issues aside, sometimes I find camping just a wee bit boring. I’m a little bit of a productivity junkie; I like to keep busy. And faced with a day of hanging around the site, I can get a bit antsy. My best trips are the ones that keep me busy and that thoroughly tire me out by the end of the day: canoeing or cycling to the next destination. Or, trips where camping is a means to an end: the tent the equivalent of a hotel room while we hang out at a music festival or stop for the night on a road trip.

And now that we have children to add to the mix, camping takes on a whole new tenor. We’re planning our first session of roughing it in the bush (as opposed to in a field with other festival-goers) with the kids this summer — Rachel wanted to head to Pukasaw, a national park four hours north of here; I talked her down to the Sleeping Giant, a breezy hour’s drive, with a little town nearby for diversions. I figure, in the event that I don’t sleep well and then am woken at five by chipmunks and a toddler, I may not have the energy to keep a watchful eye as the children stray towards open water, open fires, bears, the woods. I may need to take a little walk down the street to a coffee shop, or, at worst, make it home in short notice. At least for the first time we head out.

When Rachel and I first met, the throes of new love did a lot to temper my misgivings about camping, and Rachel’s misgivings about my misgivings about camping. We thought of each other’s quirks as simple — but adorable! — errors in judgment, each imagining that the other would come around if we could only convince her of the rightness, the moral superiority, of our positions. She would make me love camping; I would make her see the charm of a B&B.

We joked that it was a religious difference: Jews don’t camp (notwithstanding my weeklong canoe trip as a CIT at Camp Hatikvah in 1986); Gentiles do. It’s a biblical relic, really: Wasn’t wandering in the desert for 40 years enough for my people?

In the years since we met, we’ve learned the futility of trying to convince each other of our rightness and have settled for putting up with each other’s foibles as gracefully as possible. We’ve done a half-dozen or so camping trips, some involving cars, some canoes, and at least one that involved bicycles and a taped ankle. We’ve slept in one-person tents and, most recently, a behemoth that divides into two rooms with us on one side and a baby in a Pack-and-Play on the other. We’ve camped at music festivals and provincial parks, on the gorgeous beaches of Pancake Bay on the shore of Lake Superior.

And we have also bailed from the tent on a number of occasions for the relative comforts of bed and breakfasts, cheesy motel rooms, and the Best Western hotel chain. On at least one occasion, she did the bailing. Because sometimes, in the pouring rain, or when the horses in the pasture next door give you strange looks, or when you have tonsillitis, nothing quite beckons like a room. With walls. That you can stand up in. And a hot shower. And beer, brought up by room service, while you watch cheesy cable TV. And tea, with milk, first thing, the next morning.

Now, that’s roughing it.

Guess I left them in the basement too long

I’ve been so thrilled lately about the kids’ ability to go down to the basement and play, unsupervised, for at least short periods. This morning, though, I think we may have crossed the line.





Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been like the kid down the street, who used indelible Sharpies to draw coloured lines down each of the piano keys.

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.

I used to do the same thing with pimento-stuffed olives

And what is that God-awful thing she’s wearing?

For the greater good of art, I present to you this unflattering photograph of my back to the camera, as an illustration of this morning’s ritual Making of the Challah.

Do you like my apron? It was my grandmother’s: my father’s mother, who, during my childhood, made the journey from the steppes of Russia her apartment in Winnipeg to our house in Toronto twice a year, at Passover and Rosh Hashanah, and cooked her heart out. Traditional stuff: gefilte fish, honey cake, Passover rolls, kugel. She and I had a little bit of a tortured relationship in my late teens, her being all about tradition and me being, well, not so much traditional. But I do like to think that she would be pleased to see me sporting the halushious apron each week as my sons and I make Friday-night challah. Even if we do use a bread maker.

Sometimes, when time and patience are in short supply, I wait until after the kids have left for the babysitter before I get going on the braided bread routine. But this morning (despite the fact that it started, as per the current usual, at 5 AM) everything was going so swimmingly that I decided what the hell. Rowan was so eager to help that he went as far as to get his own self dressed — right down to his Home Depot apron — in order to participate. Then Isaac got in on the action, and demanded his own apron, too: we improvised with a vintage yellow bib with a Mickey Mouse decal painstakingly handstitched onto it. With him perched on the counter and Rowan on the stool, we were ready to go.

Baking with Rowan used to completely unnerve me: all those jerky movements and flying flour and overzealous mixing and the hands in the batter and the way he’d tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap an egg on the counter for a full minute without so much as bruising the shell, only to crush the thing in his fist a moment later. These days, it’s either that I’m more relaxed or he’s more skilled, because he doesn’t faze me the way he used to. Even with Isaac sitting crosslegged on the counter, repeating, “I help!” and poking teaspoons into everything, it was an entirely enjoyable exercise.

And just look at this!


Every week, it’s a struggle not to tear into one of these babies, just warm from the oven, instead of waiting until we’re at the table and the candles are lit. But I don’t, because to do that would mess with tradition, which around here dictates that Friday night dinner consists of challah and roast chicken, yam frites and broccoli. We’ve fallen into the pattern, and now there is no deviating. Not even for, say, the organic wild salmon fillets purchased for last night’s dinner that never got cooked because we were too busy enjoying soccer in the park. At snack time before bed last night, I casually put the question to Rowan as to whether he’d mind if we skipped roast chicken in favour of salmon, and he burst into tears. Don’t fuck with tradition, man. Or the wrath of the bubbies and the four-year-olds will be upon you.

Oops, we did it again!

(No, nobody’s pregnant.)

It’s happening again. I realized this last night when I found myself setting out a blueberry-banana muffin on the kitchen counter and pouring a small glass of milk, which I then stored inside the refrigerator. For easy access. For Isaac’s 5 a.m. attack of the munchies.

Yeah, we’re doing it again: segueing out of one ridiculous sleep (or lack thereof) situation into a different, also ridiculous, one, which I am sure we will maintain until we can no longer delude ourselves that it’s “okay for now,” followed by a week or so of strategizing and the imposition of said strategy, for better or for worse. Whether it’s walking around the basement with Isaac in a sling, or coming up with reward charts for Rowan, or me and Rachel alternating nights in the basement, or playing musical beds, it’s always something. Something ridiculous.

Right now, it’s this: boys have bedtime together, cuddled up for stories in Rowan’s double bed. Then Rowan decamps for our bed, where he starts the night while Isaac “settles” in his single bed (with its safety rail) in the brother room. This practice started when Rachel and I decided that we could no longer lie next to Isaac for an hour and a half each night while he took his sweet time going to sleep and screamed if we left. Four days later, we had broken him of that habit, but in the process engrained a new one in Rowan, who is still starting the night off in our bed because, as he puts it, “I don’t like toddlers sleeping in my room with me.”

Which is fine. I mean, me neither, mostly. We just move Rowan to the bed in what used to be Isaac’s room before we go to sleep. Why not back to his own bed? Because Isaac, although he now goes to sleep beautifully, has taken to waking up at 4:30 or five in the morning and screaming, “Mufffffffffin! Miiilllllllllllllllllk!” I’ve discovered that if you take him downstairs, feed him said quick snack, and keep all the lights off, he will sometimes consent to being taken back up stairs and cuddled with you in Rowan’s bed for half an hour or so. Come over! Try it! If you’re really lucky, he will actually fall back asleep, and if you are astonishingly lucky, blessed by the stars and fortune, Rowan won’t wake up only moments after that.

This is dumb.

I mean, it’s dumb because it’s just a dumb system, in the sense that in the larger scheme of things Isaac — and everyone else in the family — needs more sleep than a 4:30 wakeup call allows for. But it’s also dumb because we are repeating our own history, caught up in this seemingly endless treadmill of almost-solutions out of which spiral new problems. And new almost-solutions. Welcome to parenting, I suppose.

Do I sound bleak? I think it’s more that I’m weary: a summer cold plus seasonal allergies have added to my general fatigue. At least I’m not so far gone that I don’t take some pleasure in snuggling with the boy, who has now taken to singing “Twinkle twinkle” quietly in bed as the sun comes up. If you have to be awake at 5:30, I suppose there are worse ways to be awake.

Radical acceptance? Denial? You decide.

“How will I dance now?”

Rowan has been growing his hair. He wants to grow it long, and even though he’s currently suffering from a condition known as, in family parlance, “wide head,” and even though my fingers itch to just touch it up a little bit, to even things out, I haven’t. And I won’t.

In the realm of bodily functions and day-to-day hygiene, I make my kids do lots of things they don’t really want to do. I insist on diaper changes for Isaac, a certain amount of handwashing, toothbrushing, nose wiping, fingernail cutting and the like. I’m pretty clear about daytime clothes versus pajamas, although what Rowan actually wears tends to be what he picks out

But the hair? Now that he’s no longer a recalcitrant toddler, that’s his prerogative, a line I can’t cross.

There’s just something about the idea of forcibly cutting his hair that feels wrong to me. Whether it’s the fact that all I ever wanted as a child were Cindy Brady–pigtails, the Samson overtones, the risks inherent in wielding scissors in front of an unwilling child’s face, or — just maybe — the unnecessary insult to his sense of autonomy and self-identity, it feels viscerally unacceptable.

Which is perhaps why this report of a Thunder Bay elementary school teaching assistant forcibly cutting the hair of a seven-year-old First Nations boy is so upsetting. According to reports, the child wore his hair long because it was important to his traditional dancing practice. The boy told his mother that the teaching assistant lifted him onto a stool, put the scissors to his forehead, and told him not to move. Which he didn’t, because he was too scared. Too scared.

Too fucking scared.

And then she cut his hair in front of his classmates. And then she stood him in front of a mirror and said, “Look at you now.”

What the kid looks like now, according to his mother, are the pictures of his relatives after they were given forcible haircuts at residential school. The boy is upset and ashamed, and heartbroken at the thought of what his shorn hair means for his dancing. “How will I dance now?” he asked his mother. “How will I dance?”

The teacher has been suspended, but the police and the Crown are refusing to press charges of assault. Enough said. This is the city I live in, and its inability to deal with difference — cultural, racial, gendered, religious — has implications for us all. If this boy isn’t safe, then my kids aren’t safe. No one’s are.

I wonder what happened to this kid’s hair. Probably swept into the trash. Because isn’t that how we deal with so many First Nations issues around here? If I could restore it to his head, I would. But if I had a strand of it, I would twine it round my fingers, put it (with his permission) in a locket, wear it next to my heart. Dance, baby: dance your heart out.

He likes horses, does he?

Today was Rowan’s turn to present at “Bring and Brag,” or what in my day used to be known as “Show and Tell.” In my day, though, we were allowed to bring toys, which are now verboten. The official line is that kids will fight and get jealous over toys, but I think the real reason is to make parents’ lives more difficult. I mean, how many meaningful, non-toy objects can there be in a four-year-old’s life? The first time, we racked our brains and sent Rowan with his rock collection. The second time we came up with a papier-mâché cat he had made, accompanied by photos of our own felines. Today, we completely forgot about B&B until approximately five minutes before it was time to leave for school.

“Here,” I said, pulling a book off the shelf and a solution out of my ass. “You can tell the kids all about earthquakes.”

Recently, we were gifted a shelf full of hand-me-down books that includes a series on natural disasters: Rowan is now fascinated by all manner of plagues, including earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes and the like. We went through the book quickly, marking a couple of pages of great interest, going over a few talking points, doing up a quick PowerPoint presentation, and rushing out the door.

Turns out, it was a banner day. Not only was Rowan on for B&B, but he was also Special Person for the day, which is a big deal: the special person gets to sit in the Special rocking chair, be first in all lineups, in charge of the weather chart, and all kinds of other great stuff. There’s a Special Person poem, where the kid fills in details about his or her favourite food, thing, book, etc., and then all the kids recite it out loud.

I asked the teacher how the earthquakes presentation went. “Fine,” she said. “Except that he couldn’t really answer the question, ‘What is an earthquake?’”

D’oh.

Then I looked at the Special Person poem. Apparently, Rowan’s favourite food is crackers. No real surprise there, although I would've put money on roast chicken. His favorite book is about earthquakes, which makes total sense. And his favorite thing?

Horses.

“Horses?” I said.

“Something there surprise you?” said his teacher.

Um, no, not really, unless you count the fact that I can recall no instance in which Rowan has ever even mentioned horses. He doesn’t play with horses, unless you count a rocking horse in the basement. Last time we were at a hobby farm, he refused — by which I mean screamed in terror — to go on a pony ride. Or a horse-drawn sleigh ride. If you had asked me, I might have said trains or hide-and-seek or the camera or making slides out of Isaac’s toddler-bed railings, but never horses.

Which begs the question(s): Am I clueless about my son? Does Rowan really love horses? Or was he merely pulling the answer out of his ass? I suspect we’ll never know.

The sound of Cheerios dying

Blurry teeth marks on placemat.

Outlet.

Beach towel over chair.

Baby Alice — clothed.

Mother’s Day present.



Fishie hands.

Things up high I.

Things up high II.



Cheerios at risk.

Trains on coffee table.

Back yard.

Things up high III.

You are here. You are here. You are here.