Dec 15

Have you ever gone to the hairdresser and had the stylist try to convince you to buy their expensive hair products? They promise this shampoo will make your hair more (insert your desired adjective here).  Damaged hair? Frizzy curls? Flat and dull? They always have the product that is the exact solution to your problem and they always GUARANTEE that it will do what every other shampoo, conditioner, mousse, gel, spray, wax, cream, or freaking putty never has been able to do. Turn scraggly looking hair into the luscious celebrity styles you see on TV.  

Not that I have ever bought insanely expensive salon brand shampoo that smells exactly like cigarette butts when lathered up in the shower in hopes that my super-fine, straight hair will magically develop fantastic body. Because I am totally on to my stylist and her sneaky schemes.

Dec 1

If you were a Canadian (like me) living in the United States (like me) (or even, gasp! vice versa) you might have to deal with the small unpleasantness of having to sort out the issue of immunizations and school and the territory in between. You might have to show your child’s school evidence of said shots and this may have involved all sorts of trips to and from the doctor and phone calls to and from doctor’s offices, public health offices and hospitals all over civilization and harried conversations regarding records, faxes and PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD HURRY. And after these many phone calls without any resulting yelling or expulsion of your child from her (or his) school you might relax and choose to believe that all required faxes have been sent and received and that these things will sort themselves out.

You would be wrong.

Because after three full months of school your child’s school might finally get around to checking out the forms submitted when she enrolled in school and they might call you and leave a message on your phone in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS telling you it’s Very Important that they get your child’s Immunization Records because she May Not Attend School without Proper Documentation of her Vaccinations.

So you, being a responsible parents, would speak with the school nurses and discuss the reasons for the delinquent information (our records are in Canada and apparently faxing documents across the border is Very Hard). The nurses would probably be calmed by your Responsible Parent Voice and give you permission to bring in your personal documentation of your child’s frequent puncturage the following Monday. Which you would go ahead and do because you care about following rules.

When you bring the school nurse the information she requires she would reward your conscientiousness with a damning proclamation; your child is not fully vaccinated! UNCLEAN!!! The USA requires Hepatitis B vaccinations and Canada does not. Your child must not be allowed to pollute the school air with her dirty, unvaccinated little self one second longer (nevermind that she has already attended school for three months)!

And so you might be told to take your child home so as not to defile the purity of the school atmosphere. And your child might be brought from her classroom in tears, not wanting to leave school and you might feel ashamed, as though you had done something wrong, even though you know you haven’t.

If you were like me you might start playing phone tag (once again) with two different Canadian offices to try and get your child’s immunization records faxed to your new doctor’s office so that your doctor can sign a form for the school so they can untie the giant knot their panties are in. But both offices say they faxed those forms back in September like you asked them to. When you ask them to do it again you would probably discover that the number they originally faxed to was incorrect. So you would get them to do it again.

You would make phone calls to the doctor’s office to see if your leperous child can be immunized today so that she can return to school tomorrow. The child would weep because she fears shots like little else in this world. I mean *if* you had that kind of a kid.

And after your child is punctured you would probably ask them to confirm that they received the faxes from Canada. But they would dismiss you disdainfully, saying they had received no such fax. Because that’s the kind of day it is, and apparently fax machines in Canada are made from twigs and leaves and therefore take much longer to cross the border to America, the blessed land of technological ingenuity. 

So you would go home and although you should be making more calls to verbally kick some ass you might be feeling a tad discouraged and you might need to break down and cry for a while. Especially after your husband does some searching online and discovers that the first fax number, given to you in September was actually the right one and not the one given to you today. Then you might just want to lock yourself in the closet for a few years. I mean, that’s how I would feel if it were me.

But it’s so totally not me.

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 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.

Oct 21

This would be “The Ipod Edition” if it had been written yesterday. But since I’m running behind this week because I’ve been busying rocking it with my BFF and eating and touring and shopping and eating, it’s late. Also? This didn’t happen to me. It happened to my hubby. But I just couldn’t NOT write about it. 

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Can you imagine how disgusted you would be if, when riding your bike to work (because you are a ROCKSTAR!), you had to go rummaging through your backpack while stopped at a traffic light in order to find your asthma inhaler so you could avoid, you know, PASSING OUT?  What if, while pulling your backpack off, it started to come apart, but you failed to notice this? What if you saw the light about to change and quickly whipped the backpack around and over your shoulder, only to have the strap break? What if you saw your ipod go flying through the air in slow motion and fall to the ground in a lane of traffic? And get run over by a car. Twice.

I bet that would suck.  Not that it happened to me (or my husband). I’m just saying that if it did happen to you, you might want to write a letter to Apple to let them know that their Ipod Nano is one tough little bastard. Takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’!

Oct 13

If you had discovered your small child had an eyefull of nasty pinkeye infection, what would your first move be? That’s right, you’d take your trusty bottle of bleach to every visible surface call the doctor to secure an appointment as quickly as possible. 

But since it was the weekend, and then Columbus Day Monday, you would decide to try and handle the problem without medical intervention by going to the pharmacy to look for Polysporin Eye/Ear Drops on the advice of a friend. So when you asked the pharmacist where to find these magical drops, she might raise an eyebrow and tell you that you are so very, very stupid these drops are not available without a prescription. So you might swear loudly under your breath about the frustrating American system that requires a prescription for everything besides bandaids. 

With no other options you would give in and call the doctor’s office, hoping they might be open, only to be foiled by the medical office’s answering service and the less than perky voice on the phone. You might feel that it would be wrong to ask to speak to the ER doctor on call as conjunctivitis is not an emergency so much as a call to disinfect with ever-increasing hysteria an semi-urgent matter. So you would agree to have the nurse who can phone prescriptions into the pharmacy call you. 

When the nurse calls, you might be surprised to learn that, while she agrees that your son probably has pinkeye, the doctor’s office will not allow her to call in a prescription for such a young child. You might wonder out loud why the HELL you have been told that this nurse could call in prescriptions to pharmacies when she is neither prescribing, nor phoning pharmacies. And you might shriek wildly about ask yourself why the receptionist bothered to offer you this option when he must have known that she would be unable to help as he asked your son’s age.

Not that it’s happened to me, but I think it would be annoying. 

If you need me, I’ll be snuggling up to a gallon of bleach.

Oct 6

Can you picture what it would be like if you were out with your family in a certain metropolitan area, being the consummate tourists that you are. You might be walking around with a camera, taking pictures, and eating a picnic lunch when a perfect stranger approaches your family and asks your husband if it would be ok if his friend takes a picture of him with your family?

Before you know it your husband may have agreed to this unusual and rather bizarre proposition and said stranger might be awkwardly inserting himself between yourself and your husband and smiling for the camera while his friend snaps away. And suddenly you and your children have been immortalized on the film (or memory card) of a complete stranger.

You might shake your head and feel a bit confused about just what has happened. You might wonder if you have been mistaken for a local (which is amusing as you clearly do not have the accent of the local people) and the stranger was simply a tourist who wanted a picture with a native of the area.  Or you might wonder if you have just given some dude a picture that will end up in some creepy predator’s collage of pretty children.  

Then you might wish you had been thinking quicker on your feet and said a polite “No thank you!” even though the guy looked normal and nice and was probably just an eager tourist, overcome with photo-snapping hysteria.

Not that it happened to me. But if it had, that’s what I’d be thinking.

Sep 22

Just imagine, if you will, the look of horror on your hypothetical husband’s face when he walks into the room and asks why on earth you deleted EVERY LAST THING out of the downloads folder on the laptop?  And you look at him, and blink, because surely he is joking. While you are ignorant of nearly all things technological, surely, SURELY HE KNOWS you are not stupid enough to delete everything from the precious downloads folder on the laptop!

And then you might just have a flash of a memory go off way in the recesses of your memory of a moment not too long ago when you had the laptop open on the counter in the kitchen. And you *might* have been momentarily distracted by something and as you turned around your eye caught your two year old mashing the keyboard with glee.  

If that happened you *might* look at your fuming husband, who has smoke coming out of his ears, with wide, innocent eyes and say “Why, no! I have NO IDEA what happened!”

Not that it happened to me.  But that sure would have SUCKED if it had!

Sep 8

I imagine it would be trying if you had been displaced from you home for, ohhhh, three months and you had fought every step of the way with a moving company that was completely devoid of ethics (hypothetically named MEDLAND THE MOVER in London, ON) and the day the movers FINALLY decide to deliver your stuff coincides with your daughter’s first day of kindergarten.

So instead of enjoying the first-day-of-school hype you might be busy trying to get everyone dressed and organized in the morning so as not to still be in pajamas and packing a lunch when the movers arrive. Instead of having a half hour photo session in front of your house in the morning you might haphazardly snap a few quick shots while your movers set up their ramps and mats. You *might* wish you had spent more than ten seconds taking what will undoubtedly be poor pictures in front of the school before rushing your daughter through the front doors of the school with barely a backwards glance and anxiously hurrying home.

I’m not saying it happened to me, but if it had, I might be too busy to get weepy when dropping my big girl off for her first full day of school because my mind would be on eleventy million other things.

Like why a deep freeze might be full of mold when most people (and I include myself in that category) would meticulously clean every square inch of it after defrosting it and before loading it into a truck to be stored for three straight months. Most people might wonder why professional movers would shove dirty and crap-laden junk inside in a sparkly clean deep freeze to fester and grow mold over the duration of the storage period.  

I’m just saying that IF I were the one who had such a tiring and rushed day and if I had not shed a single tear when dropping my daughter off for her first full day of school, I *might* lose it and start sobbing loudly when her face lit up the moment she saw me after school and she ran to me with a huge smile and a big hug.  

And that moment alone would probably make up for the fact that a person in that busy situation *might* forget to bring her daughter to her first gymnastics class later that afternoon. The class that this entirely fictional mother might have had to beg, plead and grovel to get her daughter into as registration was 2 weeks ago.

Not that it happened to me.

Aug 18

I’m guessing it would be *unfortunate* if a person made a double recipe of refried beans, intending to take them to an outdoor potluck with a jumbo bag of nacho chips, and then failed to attend said potluck due to poor weather.  Because if that were to happen, one would be left with TWO POUNDS of refried beans which would be eaten for meals and snacks for one week straight.  Unfortunate in terms of a healthy diet. Also in terms of the air quality in one’s “hypothetical” apartment.

Not that it happened to me. But I imagine a scenario like that would be … um … pungent, to say the least. Just sayin’.

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