Nov 28

If you got here because you are looking for ACTUAL recipes for some fantastic or unusual vegan Thanksgiving alternaturkey you are in the wrong place. Sorry!

I’m just here musing about what a Canadian family should do when they are in the USA on American Thanksgiving? We don’t have anyone to celebrate with and I already cooked a turkey dinner for Canadian Thanksgiving in October and I’m not prepared to cook three turkeys in less than three months. So we skipped the turkey.

After some research we discovered the local zoo had a Christmas lighting display that was opening Thanksgiving evening and it sounded like something fun to do as a family. So we decided to stop for supper on the way and then tour the lights. 

Guess how many restaurants are open on American Thanksgiving? Go on, guess.

That’s right, there’s exactly NOTHING open here on Thanksgiving. Not gas stations, not grocery stores, not drug stores, not fast food and not restaurants. 

After some searching we found a restaurant that was opening up at 5pm so we drove around and found a park to let the kids play at in the dark for half an hour until we could get in to eat (that’s right it’s totally dark here by 4:30pm now! I HATE daylight savings time!). We had a pleasant dinner and headed out to the zoo, which we found without a problem and was open and everything!

We enjoyed ourselves at the zoo, walking around and looking at light displays and 25 year old moving stuffed animals that had seen better days. But our kids were thrilled. We did not pay $823279 dollars to have their pictures taken with Santa. We did pay $5 for all of us to ride the carousel for 45 seconds. The kids were besides themselves, family togetherness, blah blah,, yadda yadda.

We head home around 7:30pm and as we pull away we realize that our camera case is missing. We argue all the way home about who had it last and who is responsible for losing it. Because that’s just the kind of loving and forgiving relationship we have – the kind that needs to find our WHOSE FAULT IT IS.

So our merry-making, festive mood has been dampened just a little bit when we pull up to the house and the hubby says “I’m going to need your house key to get in the house”. I have a vague recollection of him telling me when we left the house that he had forgotten to replace his house key on his keychain after lending it to houseguests on the weekend so they could come and go.  At the time it never connected in my brain that I had left my key chain in a different jacket in the house because hubby had keys and we were all fine.

Except for his house key.

GAH.

Normally that wouldn’t be a problem. Our landlord lives on the other side of our duplex and we can just grab the spare key from him. Except if it’s THANKSGIVING and our landlord is out celebrating with his family half an hour out of town.

And guess which five year old reeeeeally had to pee right about now? Yeah, that one. Forgot about her, didn’tcha?

No problem. We’ll know a couple of our neighbours and we’ll just knock on their doors and ask to use their bathroom…except if NONE OF THEM ARE HOME BECAUSE IT’S EFFING THANKSGIVING. 

So we’re trying not to get Avery more worked up but we really have no idea where we’re going to be able to find a bathroom as every effing thing is closed.  After 15 minutes of driving we located an open gas station after stopping at a McDonalds that LOOKED like it was open but was actually just attempting to lure poor non-celebrating-thanksgiving-rebels like ourselves and then laugh at us while our daughter dances around frantically and we desperately pull on the locked doors.

We call and leave a message on our landlord’s cell and he calls us back just minutes later (THANK GOD FOR A GREAT LANDLORD) and he offers to let his dog eat us us into his place with his doorway from the garage to the living room (we don’t have one of these). We politely offer to wait for him to come home and he says he’ll be home within a half hour or so and we weep in gratitude thank him profusely. We drive home and hang out in the car in our garage, letting the kids climb all over each other until our landlord and his family arrive home to let us in.  Tired children are put to bed. We settle in for the evening and relax. All is well.

Until the next morning when we leave to meet friends for lunch and discover that we left the interior lights on all night and the battery is dead. Awesome.

Nov 27

Ok, parents of little boys (or parents of girls who display the following behaviours), tell me something! Do your sons have a serious aversion to clothing? Because my two year old son has recently developed a debilitating obsession with being naked as much as possible. How am I supposed to deal with this? How do I deal with the tantrums every time we announce it’s time to get dressed, the refusal to keep his clothes on, the demands for “MOOH NAKIT!!!” and the flailing elbows and knees when we try to dress him? And WHY is he so resistant to clothing all of a sudden when he never was before?  As cute as he is when he runs around in the buck, there are still certain occasions where it is unacceptable to show up unclothed. Help!

Also, guess which new and annoying word has now become part of the boy-child’s vocabulary? That’s right. WHY.  

I’m screwed, aren’t I?

Nov 25

I’ve heard this rumour about houseplants. Something about them needing natural light and water? Anyone heard that before? Bizarre, I know! But I have this friend (not at ALL me) who had two substantial sized houseplants that were stored in giant cardboard boxes in a storage facility while she moved to a foreign country (possibly the USA, Boston area. Maybe.). And it took longer than anticipated for her plants (along with all her other belongings to be delivered to her new home and so when the plants finally arrived on the big truck they had been in the dark for somewhere in the vicinity of three months.

She wasn’t expecting them to have survived.  Because houseplants that go without light or water for three months are generally categorized as compost material and not plant life. But they had, in fact, survived their ordeal and although they did look a bit rough, they did not look dead.  

And so my friend took the two plants and placed them on her deck so that they would have maximum exposure to daylight and hopefully recover from their long, dark night.

What my friend did not take into account was the fact that her east-facing deck also faces the ocean and is the direct recipient of the sun’s first rays as it rises over the horizon and that makes it exactly the same as placing those two poor plants in front of an enormous bonfire. On the surface of the sun.  And so within 24 hours the plants had been sunburned within an inch of their lives and the few remaining leaves had shrivelled up and burned up into small piles of ashes around each pot.  

Most people would give up the fight at this point but not my friend.  Oh no. She was willing to take even more dramatic measures to give her little green brownish friends a chance at life! So she took a pair of kitchen shears and clipped and trimmed hacked and chopped until there was nothing left but a stump in each pot. And then she made several small sacrifices of fertilizer to the gods of horticulture and hoped for the best.

Miraculously, the plants came back with new growth in a matter of a few short weeks and before long they were small, but healthy looking houseplants once again! 

So after the lives of these two houseplants, though fraught with peril, had survived intact and life had resumed as normal, my friend may have been a tad dismayed to discover her two year old standing beside a suspiciously naked fern stalk holding fistfuls of leaves.

Not that it happened to me. I’m just saying, it might feel like getting bitch-slapped up one side and down the other.

Nov 24

A short update for those of you who made donations for the group of women in the Philippines that I posted about on Blog Action Day…

Yesterday was the day that the women gathered and the gifts were distributed. I am so grateful to those of you who generously donated money to help out people who really need it. I know some of you reached beyond personal or religious beliefs in order to do so and I think that is a true example of what it means to be a global citizen and to care for your fellow humans. These twelve families were blessed by your generosity and touched that people around the world would care about their needs. Thank you for taking action! You are amazing!

Here is a picture of the whole group of them in the home of my friend Jessica and her husband as they celebrated together. Enjoy the faces of those you have helped!

Nov 23

Oh good grief! We’ve been hit by the Stinkeye once again. Both kids, both eyes. Avery hasn’t had pinkeye since she was really little and is freaking out and losing her mind every time I come at her with the antibiotic ointment (leftover from the last bout of conjunctivitis, and yes, I know you’re not supposed to do that, but since pinkeye ALWAYS shows up at our house late Friday night that means it’s pretty complicated to find a doctor to prescribe anything until Monday so YES I KEPT THE DAMN TUBES OF OINTMENT!!!!) like I’m coming at her with hot pokers and saying “It won’t hurt a bit, I PROMISE!”  

Meanwhile we have friends visiting and I’m sure they wish they’d never come to our den of bacterial iniquity.  

And really, I have nothing else to write about because I have also been struck down by the common cold some kind of plague and am busy whining my face off suffering quietly while groaning about lovingly tending to my children’s goopy eyes. Back soon, my friends.

Nov 21

 

  • When reading a certain favourite story she says “Mommy, this is my favourite page of this story because I like the word arose.” I totally get that. I love that kind of language. It’s why I loved to read the Oz books and Lucy Maud Montgomery’s and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s stories. 
  • She is as easily discouraged by her inability to do things perfectly the first time as I am, despite my concerted efforts to not pass on this trait and show her that all that is important is that she try her best.
  • She frequently sits down to write stories. When I was a child I loved to do this. Her most recent titles? The Lonely Pony and The Boy Who Was Allergic to Flowers.
  • Her inability to understand mean kids’ actions or why anyone would have a problem listening to and immediately obeying the teacher or other authorities. We are rule-followers, her and I.
  • She loves to give gifts and is constantly making cards and “presents” for people. One of her favourite imaginary games to play with her little brother is “giving presents” where they wrap up their toys in their special blankets and solemnly present them to each other.  
  • She has a bossy side and it shows up frequently in her interactions with her little brother as mine did with my sisters.
  • She wants to be told, over and over, that she is loved and accepted and appreciated and that she is good enough.

I know she won’t be an exact copy, but it’s frightening how many of my own traits I recognize in her. Some are thrilling. Others make me worry for the hard lessons she will have to learn as she grows. It’s like watching a younger version of myself going out to make the same mistakes and it feels like I have so little power to stop it. I try to gently guide her to stand up for herself and I suspect she has more chutzpah than I ever did. I just hope I can figure out the right way to nurture it.

Nov 18

I’ve been thinking about The Wizard of Oz ever since it came up the other day. Even before posting about it I have been reading it to my five year old so it was on the brain.

As a child I read and reread several of the “Oz” books, but somehow never picked up the first in the series and only just now realized there are thirteen sequels to the book! My main reason for not reading the original story was mostly because I’d seen the movie eleventy kajillion times and thought I would be bored. I had forgotten how much I adore L. Frank Baum’s style. There is something totally whimsical and enchanting about his stories and the writing is witty and wonderfully entertaining.  

“Tell me something about yourself, and the country you came from,” said the Scarecrow, when she had finished her dinner. So she told him all aout Kansas, and how grey evertything was there, and how the cyclone had carried her to this queer Land of Oz.

The Scarecrow listened carefully, and said, “I cannot understnad why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, grey place you call Kansas.”

“That is because you have no brains,” answered the girl. “No matter how dreary and grey our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.”

The Scarecrow sighed

“Of course I cannot understand it,” he said. “If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.”

                                -L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz

Nov 17

So what if you were one of those people who does the Santa myth with your kids. Not to the extreme point where you buy separate wrapping paper to wrap the “Santa” gifts (shut up, I’ve known people who did this) or would keep lying about it long past when it seemed reasonable to do so. But you might have told your kids the Santa story and read books about Santa and seen Santa in the mall. And occasionally your five year old might have had a question or two about how the whole Santa thing works but they were always easily laid to rest without any hassle.

But what if one day the easy answers are no longer enough and you know that Santa is on thin ice that is about to crack? 

What if you’d had several long discussions with a good friend who deliberately chooses not to tell her kids about Santa for various reasons and you had had a friendly debate on the merits of telling versus not telling your kids about Santa. And at the end of that discussion you agreed to disagree without judgment and you were all “Psssh! It’s NO BIG DEAL. When she figures it out, that’s that. It’s not going to be traumatic. She won’t be upset that we lied told her a story. It’ll be part of the fun! I’m certainly not going to go out of my way to keep the myth alive.” 

You might have said that. You might even have believed it. Except when that moment came when her little five year old mind seemed to be making leaps in logic it was previously not capable of, you panicked and scrambled to patch up the holes she punched in the story and breathed a sigh of relief when she backed off. And then it happened again the next week. And one more time a few days later.

At that point you might have started to realize her Santa days were numbered. And you might have questioned why you are feeling so damn anxious and sad and more than a little compelled to make icing sugar footprints on the kitchen floor. You might wonder why you are clinging with such tenacity to such a ridiculous symbol of her childhood that’s based on a lie story, despite your many protests and assurances to your friend that all would be well.

You might finally realize that your daughter would not be traumatized by discovering there is no Santa. She is just doing what she is supposed to; growing, learning, thinking, puzzling, concluding. In reality, the one who will be emotionally damaged when the facade is over is YOU.

Not that it happened to me. I’m just saying.

Nov 16

I’ve been seeing this meme around lately and because I’m never one to wait to for an invitation I’m showing up uninvited and I brought a few friends. Hope that’s ok.

(Actually this is a total lie. I’m totally not a party-crashing kind of person and I would be absolutely mortified to do this in real life but hello, it’s a blog, and no one gives a crap about memes!)

So the meme involves finding your sixth photo folder and then showing the sixth picture from that folder. Since I’m a mac-whore I translated that into mac and made it work in iPhoto and this is the picture, taken on our first digital camera which probably had all of half a mega-pixel:

This is a picture of my daughter from around November 2003 and it’s actually the 5th and not the 6th picutre but I figured you’d forgive me. They’re basically the same pose except in the other one Avery had one bright red devil-eye and one normal eye. The scene is this: I was taking advantage of one of the few moments of solace we’d had from crying in the 4 months since she was born and trying to capture a happy moment and taking pictures of her adorable smooshy self sitting on our wingback chair in the living room seemed like a good way to do that.

In truth, the majority of the first few months she looked more like this:

So chill-inducing precious, right? That’s from the same folder.

In hindsight, I am wondering if maybe she was scared of the bizarre assortment of freaky animals hanging over her bed and stuffed in every corner and crevice.  If I was stuck in a cage with some of those beasties I might cry, too! I’m not sure if it is better to think that I was just a terribly insensitive mother or that she was the most miserable, unhappy child ever to be birthed by a clueless mother.

Oh and since we’re poking around in that folder let’s take a closer look at that hair (and by closer I mean not really any closer because the crappy old digital pictures don’t allow much zooming and cropping):

Hard to believe that hair turned into this in a matter of months, isn’t it?

Look at those cheeks. Nom, nom, nom.

Nov 15

Dear Hater,

First of all it is totally not classy to leave a hate-comment on an old post. 

Second, while you are entitled to an opinion on my cake-decorating skills, making a bad cake does not make me a bad mom. I never claimed to be a professional, so shut the hell up.

Third, while I certainly could have bought a crappy grocery store cake, that wouldn’t guarantee that it would be nicer.

Fourth, that cake was my daughter’s dearest birthday wish, so the time and energy invested in it was to make her happy. And she was happy. Thrilled, in fact! If you had read more than one post on my blog, you’d realize that. Also, the kids helped me make the cake, so it’s not like I locked them in a closet while I baked and decorated. But thank you for judging me so quickly. Obviously I value the opinion of someone who has never met me or taken the time to read more than a couple hundred words I wrote one day several months ago. So thank you for saving me from myself!

Fifth, leaving a fake email address is so last year. Also? Quit surfing the net while at work. It doesn’t take a genius to find out where you’re located (Hello, Quan, Burdette & Perez P.C. Legal Services!) and luckily I’m married to one badass tech-geek who can probably find out your home address in five minutes.  You’re lucky I don’t call your work and report your lazy ass. Or at least report your fake name’s lazy ass.

Disdainfully yours,
Shannon

Dear Quan, Burdette & Perez P.C., 5177 Richmond Ave., Suite 800, Houston, Texas 77056,

One of your employees is surfing on company time. And besides that? He/she is an asshole. Time for the “respecting company time and resources” lecture!

Respectfully yours,
Shannon

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