August 2008

Today is Friday. The Friday before a long weekend. The last Friday before the kids return to school.

Can you FEEL the excitement?

I’ve got loads of laundry in the machine – with more to come this weekend, surely, after we sort through some of the bins.

This weekend we’ll make up some granola bars for lunches. Plan what other foods we’ll be including.

The backpacks have been stuffed with school supplies. New pens and paper and binders and pencil crayons and markers and rulers and scissors and, oh, man, I’m jealous of them for that. It even smells delicious and like a fresh start.

Oldest One and Middle One start school on Tuesday – Sept 2 – but Maymo only attends one afternoon (Sept 4) and then has to wait to start full-time afternoons on Sept 8.

The kids are playing nonchalant about it – even Maymo, preparing to start Senior Kindergarten at a new school, is calm and collected.

But me? I CAN’T WAIT!

I anticipate a few afternoon naps for myself. Some sewing. Some housework on a much bigger scale (it’s much easier to clean and tidy when no one runs through the wet floor two seconds after completion). Some reading! Outdoor stuff! THE LIBRARY!

I’ll even get to visit with friends! Run errands without three people attached to me!

My brain will be EMPTY for a few hours each day. I can hardly contain myself!

Holy crap, I am SO READY for this.

Me: …and blahblahblah UFC and blahblah.

Oldest One: And UFC.. blahblahblahblah..

Maymo: Mom? What’s UFC? What is it?

Me: UFC? Oh, it’s the best EVER homoerotic sport!

Maymo: Okay!

Maymo is going through a stage that I remember vividly from my own childhood: Mixing Foods Together To Make Yummy New Foods That Are Actually Disgusting.

He’s been playing amateur bartender lately, with his pop, which I’ve been happy to let him do providing he heeds the warning of, “You mix it, you drink it.” I figure that’s a life skill, y’know?

My tolerance for this new hobby stems from my own childhood. I recall a phase where I applied a liberal coating of BBQ sauce to everything and anything I could – from fruit to cottage cheese to toast to pasta to, yes, ice cream. And I remember my parents being grossed-out by this but, at the same time, they did pick me up bottles of the stuff on every grocery trip. My paternal-grandmother even gave me some for Christmas.

(You have NO idea how giddy I was to open up a box containing four or five bottles of BBQ sauce. It was one of those “BEST PRESENTS EVER, BOBCI!!” moments.)

But Maymo is not content to add a topping to his food. No sirree. His thing is to mix milk with pop and drink it – even as it curdles and turns into chunks and gets stuck in the straw.

Uh huh. *shudder*

As we ate dinner on Friday, he poured a glass of lemon-lime pop for himself, added in a very large quantity of milk, and everyone at the table watched in complete gagging horror as the entire thing turned into a large chunk of clotted-up milk with a dribble of liquid on top.

We all covered our mouths as he slurped the big chunks up the (clear, see-through) straw. It looked like he had dropped a couple of large, puffy marshmallows into his drink – they just bobbed around in there, all chunky-curdly.

When he drained the glass completely, leaving just a few little clots on the sides, he announced that it was “Really good!” and not one of us could look him in the eyes because, seriously? Ew. Just… ew.

Variosity? Variedinity? Eh, let’s just spend Monday making up new words and avoiding the fact that it’s Monday, ok?

I’m typing this on a new keyboard. It’s an ergonomic one again, after years of not having an ergonomic one, and my typing speed has decreased from 98wpm+ to about 3wpm. Seriously. I’m tolerating it only because it seems to be doing some good for my wrist. It also has a weird “thunky” space bar and the rest of the keys are totally silent. Gah. Maybe I can stuff it with cotton?

This weekend was busy and blurry and all ’round good times. Rather than giving you a play-by-play, I’ll give you the highlights.

On Sunday, my favourite Kelly in the entire world came to visit. She got to meet the kids for the first time (and they were, of course, mellow and reasonably calm and totally unlike themselves) and I was totally giddy to see her.

I can’t believe it’s been over a YEAR since we were last together; it’s a good thing I like Sylvain or I’d be petitioning Kelly to move back to Waterloo immediately for my own selfish reasons. (And, truthfully? If Sylvain didn’t have a job and a life and a family where he is, I’d be totally petitioning them BOTH to move here.)

It was just so nice to see her.

And then, last night, the kids had a sleepover in Oldest One’s room – the first in a while- as they’ve managed to earn back pretty much all of their previously-lost privileges in the past week. I keep a small stock of “glow sticks” purchased from the dollar store (in case of impromptu raves!) and doled out a few to them ahead of time for the ‘party’. They LOVE them and, man, at 2-for-a-dollar, they’re a good deal.

Given the level of snarky this morning, from all three of them, I doubt anyone got much sleep. But at least they had fun, right?

Backtracking…On Saturday, Coffee and I took the kids to the library (of course!) and then we ran 800,000 errands and crossed about 700,000 things off of the big fat To Do list. Ahhhhhh…delightful!

Coffee and I are now the proud co-owners of a pretty cobalt-blue DS (with which we shall hone our ass-kicking skills until we can beat the kids at all of their favourite games and thus ruin their child-like happiness) and we picked up SD cards for each kid to use on the Wii so we can put an end to the shrieking, “HE USED MY FILE AND DELETED MY GAMES!”. We also grabbed a lovely USB hub for my computer’s assorted peripherals. In other words, our geeky sides are happily fulfilled for a bit.

The other highlight, for me at least, is that Coffee and I felt super duper brave and took all three kids to Ye’s Sushi where we ordered heaps of chicken for them and some assorted bits and pieces for ourselves. All three kids tried new foods (!!!) and we learned that Maymo likes zucchini and shrimp, Middle One likes edamame, and Oldest One tasted raw salmon, some rolls, roe, and wasabi. I was TOTALLY proud of them.

That, and I was giddy to have some sushi. I mean, really.

We picked up the final school-requirements for the kids and we got them some new water bottles for their new backpacks.

We didn’t do a single drop of housework on the weekend (which means today is going to be a day of cleaning and decluttering and scrubbing for me, of course) but the kids watched movies with Coffee while I went out bra shopping (completely unsuccessfully, I might add) and we all got time to relax.

And now it’s Monday and, on peeking, I have over 300 emails in my inbox that require some sort of action (hopefully most only require the “archive” button) and I need to look into getting Middle One registered for Boy Scouts and art school. I gotta’ get the kids’ laundry done, the kitchen scrubbed, the floors vacuumed, and, yes please, a nice long shower for myself too.

How was your weekend??

I assume that, when I tell you something, you are likely to share it with your spouse/SO/partner even in the event that I’ve said, “Please don’t tell anyone.”

I assume it because I tell Coffee everything. He’s like an extension of my brain at times – helping me sort through thoughts, plans, conversations, mistakes, wonderfulness.. everything. And I don’t keep secrets from him.

This is not to say that he’s necessarily interested, of course.

Do you tell your spouse/SO/partner everything? Do you share?

The other night, getting ready for bed, I caught a whiff of the air outside the open window and.. it smelled like autumn.

Now y’all who’ve known me a while are aware that autumn is not a season I celebrate. In fact, other than the dismissal of hot-sweaty weather, I have always found autumn to be at best distasteful and at worst a panic-inducing precursor to “depression season”. The Season of Death. The season of misery. The season where I wish to hibernate and avoid eye contact.

And yet, as I brushed my teeth, I felt a tiny quiver of excitement.

That’s right. EXCITEMENT.

ABOUT AUTUMN.

One could credit the return of school – the kids heading away from the house for HOURS at a time! without me! leaving me alone! – and perhaps the purchase of school supplies in great quantities helped me. Stationery is ALWAYS an upper, after all, and having some fresh Sharpies and a new notebook is about the same as injecting some sort of upper directly into my veins.

But my mind started leaping from those hours (alone! in the house! no kids!) while the kids are in school to the idea of wearing my hoodies again to the idea of Rockton Fair to the idea of Thanksgiving stuffing to the idea of cool breezes… and I felt GOOD.

REALLY good.

Hold me, please, because I am frightened.

And really looking forward to autumn.

The kids came inside the house to tell me that they were going to be playing in the yard instead of the park. When I asked why, they told me that a woman had accused them of stealing toys from her son and, when they said they had just arrived at the park (and thus had no chance to steal anything at all) she got snarky and said, “I SHOULD HOPE NOT. Two big kids like you stealing from my little boy!” and got up in their faces about it.

So I told the kids to wait in the driveway and made my way over to the park so I could kick that woman’s ass find out what was going on.

The woman and her kid were gone, however, so I didn’t have the chance.

What the hell?

And, also, how many times do I have to TELL you people to NOT fuck with my kids? Seriously, it’s like you WANT me to get arrested.

So, have you missed me? Huh? Huh? HUH?

I took the kids to see “Wall-E” today – in a theatre that had, at most, 20 people in it. It was a matinee far enough from when the movie opened that no one else was interested, I guess, which was totally to our benefit.

Watching movies with the kids makes me insane – due to my own issues, I mean – and I did spend part of the movie white-knuckling the arm rest to avoid snatching the crinkly wrappers and empty cups that the children insisted on loudly slurping anyway and flinging them across the theatre as hard as I could.

I was the only one irritated, by the way, and I know this because there was a little girl running up and down the aisles through the whole movie, a boy a few rows back laughing like a hyena in all the wrong places, and from the sounds of it, a couple who were trying to conceive at one of the quieter parts of the plot.

I also had to avoid stuffing something into the mouth of the child who insists on narrating everything that’s going on and hypothesizing loudly about what might happen next.

(“I BET THAT’S A BOMB, MOM!” “HAHAHAHA! Wall-E just picked up that thing! DID YOU SEE THAT MOM?” “Ooooh! That was a big explosion, huh?”)

My favourite part? About 10 minutes into the movie, long after Wall-E has been noted as being Wall-E, Middle One turned to me and said (loudly), “Is this Wall-E now?” which caused the people a few rows behind us to start snickering.

Everyone emerged from the theatre unscathed. Honest. I even enjoyed parts of the movie – though I wouldn’t call it amazing or to-die-for or anything like that.

One of the kids is a chronic complainer which I find really difficult. He complained that we were seeing the movie at this particular theatre (despite him never being there before) and that he wasn’t getting the LARGE popcorn and that his drink was too small (it only came in one size) and that he didn’t want to carry his own stuff and that there wasn’t enough butter on his popcorn and I kept myself from screaming by simply uttering, “I think you meant to say ‘thanks, Mom for bringing me here/buying me a drink/letting me have popcorn, right?’” over and over as needed.

(By the way? 3 kids + 1 adult + matinee pricing + snacks = $60 Jesus.)

The kids are now outside playing for a while in the hopes of burning off some energy and I’m going to start making dinner shortly.

I wonder: is anyone still reading? Have I lost you for good?

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Life goes on, lately, without much to report.

We get up, Coffee goes to work, I wrangle kids, we eat dinner and then we all go to sleep.

That’s the sum of things around here lately.

Perhaps inspiration will strike? I’ll get back to you on that.