April 12, 2009
Easter Sunday
Even though we celebrate religious holidays in a secular fashion at our house, there was plenty going on this Easter Sunday. Springtime, first of all, with blue skies and sunshine. Tulips on the table, and a special Springtime cake. The ever-present squirms of our baby, who we’re just weeks away from meeting. A brilliant dinner of delicious lamb and vegetables, and seeing family. The wonderful news of another new baby, to be joining our extended family in October. This whole weekend full of good friends, delightful celebrations, and the week-old baby we got to play with on Friday. (Indeed, our lives are babyful of late. Which is good practice.) And another day off tomorrow. Now reading (the gorgeous) The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and certainly this is life.
February 26, 2009
Two fat things, and a few wonderful things
I’m now reading and thoroughly enjoying a big fat American novel, Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos. To be followed by The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant by Michel Trembley, which appears to have no paragraphs, but all the same, I’m hoping to really like it. Which will be my Canada Reads lot read. And then, that my dad is now cancer-free, my husband does not have glaucoma but that he does still have a job, and our baby is fabulous and kicking. We’ve booked a weekend away in early April. Also, how about this weather? It felt like springtime on this February morning…
February 5, 2009
Babies and reading
A few weeks back I was happy to discover that Kate Christensen has a new novel coming out in early June. I’ll be reading it, naturally, though when, I cannot say. If I do happen to be 41 weeks pregnant in early June, then perhaps a good book will be welcome company, though it’s just as likely I’ll be a brand new mother with just a week’s experience, so I probably won’t be reading much of anything.
There are mothers who read, of course– mothers of babies and mothers of toddlers. I know this mostly because I read their blogs, and these mothers provide me with a great deal of reassurance. That having my baby won’t require handing my brain in (or if it does, at least I get it back in a little while). I’ve been planning my summer rereading project already, as I always do, and it’s mainly consisting of easy, well-loved novels that won’t require a great deal of concentration– I’m thinking Good in Bed, Saturday, Happy All the Time, and, if I’m feeling brave, A Novel About My Wife. It would be nice to read maybe one a week? (At the moment I read about three, but then I also work full time.)
I was going to cancel my subscription to The London Review of Books, but I’ve since decided otherwise. I hope motherhood won’t be an excuse to just give up being challenged, and I certainly won’t have to read the whole of every issue. But the articles that interest me are just so interesting, and I learn so much from them. I will be cutting down on the number of periodicals that come into our house though, which probably would be a good idea anyway.
Anyone who has ever had a baby is probably by now hysterical with laughter at my naivete, but let me tell you that whenever I’m told something isn’t possible, I tend to get it done. My mother says that babies sleep a lot. If I remember correctly, Alice Munro has said something much the same, so I believe it. I am also determined to master nursing and reading, which can’t be impossible as I’ve already taught myself to floss and read, and knit and read, so this is just another challenge. But I will try to keep an open mind and my expectations only moderately high.
If by the end of the summer, I’ve read Kate Christensen’s new novel at all, I’ll consider myself not too far off track.
November 24, 2008
Birthday Love
I’ve spent the past three month in a pregnant napping stupor, standing up friends, missing out on events and generally ensuring I was in bed by nine every night. Also staying in bed as long as possible in the mornings and napping through my lunch. As I move into my second trimester, however, there begins to be some light. You’ll not have seen any evidence of it here though, as I’ve spent the last two weeks writing for deadlines and working very hard, in addition to my day job (where I work less hard, but it still takes up time). Going forward, I expect to have a little more time free and you can expect to see some content up here more than once in a while!
This past weekend’s excuse was a good one though, as I spent it celebrating my beloved Stuart’s birthday. Now I’m up for celebrating Stuart at any time, but a special weekend set aside for him couldn’t be more deserved. We had a house full of friends over last night who felt similarly, and it was a wonderful time– I stayed up until 1:00, which is now the beginning of the second middle of the night in my new life. Never mind I could hardly stand or talk, I was there till the end. It was fabulous, if just a little crowded. We’ve spent today eating the leftover dips and crackers and cheese (and cake!), as well as taking in some brunch and spending a couple of hours at the ROM this afternoon (we recommend the Unbuilt Toronto exhibition).
So happy birthday to Stuart, who is my every dream come true. My partner on all my best adventures and on the most exciting still to come. Every year I marvel as what you’ve accomplished for yourself and for us, and I always know how lucky I am.
September 3, 2008
Delightful Things
This past weekend, because it was long, because it was summery weather, and because my sister-in-law was staying with us, we indulged in delightful things. Chocolate raspberry tarts at Dessert Trends, a sunny afternoon at Riverdale Farm, bbq indulgences (esp. corn on the cob and mmm that grilled peach blue cheese salad was good), a trip out of town to the Twenty Valley where we loaded up on gorgeous produce from a roadside stand, and then to Ward’s Island yesterday, to wade in the warm (!) and gorgeous Lake Ontario and dinner at The Rectory Cafe. All in all a perfect way to kiss goodbye the summer, or perhaps more to give summer a whole lot of temptation to stay. Just a little bit longer?
We’d been discussing Rosie Little earlier this week, my sister-in-law and I, having both fallen in love with Danielle Wood’s tales something fierce. And we were talking about the restaurant in Vancouver where Rosie has tea at the end of the book– The Junction Tea Room? (Which I cannot
verify, as my downstairs neighbour has borrowed my copy for a holiday to Japan). And how we wished the magical tea room was real, but a fruitless Google search suggested it wasn’t. Alas. And then come Sunday afternoon in Jordan Ontario, we find the only parking space in down right out from of the Twenty Valley Tea House.
We had a brilliant afternoon tea there, sun pouring in through the windows. As at The Junction Tea Room, we got to select our own cups and saucers, mismatched and gorgeous. A hat racked mounted with chapeaus and feathers was there for our pleasure, should we choose to
partake. Oh, the tea was delicious, the cakes and triangle sandwiches. Ok, there was no cream (no cream?!) but the scones were so moist and flavourful, none was really required. We ate in tiny bites, morsels, in that afternoon tea way that always has us come out stuffed. Afterwards, a browse in the gift shop, with tea goods for our pleasure. All in all, a superlative teaish experience. Even worthy of fiction…
August 27, 2008
Schedules Amok
Schedules are all running strangely of late, because we have a house guest, because she arrived in the middle of the night Sunday night, because we keep going out for meals with her and feel as though we’re on vacation too. I’m currently rereading A Prayer for Owen Meany and just not getting into it. I always loved John Irving, but I’ve not read him for years, and I feel I may have lost the habit. It’s also looong and I am eager to get through it in order to reach my final reread (The Long Secret), and then begin to tackle the wonderful stack of unread books on my shelf that have been gathering there since the end of June.
And so I’ve made no time for writing these last few days (here or anywhere) and consequently we’ll all have to make due to with links. Oh, like Lizzie Skurnick revisits Flowers in the Attic. Nigel Beale refuses the Refuses. Laurel Snyder interviewed at Baby Got Books (and I’ll be reading her book v.v. soon). Why postscripts still matter in the digital age. Rebecca Rosenblum is a Reader Reading (and now she’s got her own Facebook group too).
August 17, 2008
An affinity for pie dough
I’ve been baking pie all summer, having decided it was a very good way to honour summer fruit (and keep some around for the dead of winter), and also because it has never once been so hot that turning on the oven has been ridiculous. (I was also inspired by watching Waitress.)
This summer I’ve made strawberry rhubarb pie, strawberry pie, raspberry pie, peach pie and blueberry pie. Each of these pies has also had its filling run into the bottom of my oven (which I never clean) and so a smoke-filled kitchen has become the usual. Each time the pastry has been delicious.
As you can see by the photo, when I bake I make a mess. I do clean it up afterwards, of course, but what you can also see by the photo is my grandmother’s rolling pin. I know very little about the origins of said rolling pin, and it is quite likely she picked it up at Zellers in 1998, so it is probably not a valuable heirloom. But I find that I like that it was hers, I like that I roll out my piecrust with it, the pin she would have rolled her own piecrust out with. Genetics aside, my grandmother and I never had a whole lot in common, and so I appreciate the connection that is this.
In my family, people like to take one another apart to figure out how we were constructed. My mania for pie-making, for instance, my mother wonders about, for she’s never had much of an instinct for pastry. I think she wonders if I was a changeling, and so it brings her some comfort to attribute it to an atavistic pie gene instead. To tie it back to my grandmother, but I resist this. Mostly because I am twenty nine years old and would like to believe that I am a singular creation, not the product of anything, nor susceptible. I am ME, and I bake pie because I do, and also because I really like to eat it.
My grandmother was good at all grandmotherly things, very dutiful and I’ve saved the notes she wrote me when I was younger, admonishments, some of them, to be a good girl. Never a demonstrative woman, it was through these gestures, like her pies and like her cookies, that my grandmother showed her love. And so it is unfortunate that I, in addition to pie-baking, have always had a talent for delightedly irritating people of my grandmother’s sensibility. For asking questions like, “So, if your name is Helen, then your nickname must be “Hell”, right?” You can see that I’ve always been adorable.
I took my grandmother’s rolling pin when we cleaned out her kitchen after she died, mostly because I didn’t have a nice one. I didn’t think much of it, pie after pie, for such a long time– that my hands, like her hands did, are rolling out the dough. That object, the rolling pin, had been in her cupboard and that it lives in mine now. I never suspected that we’d come to have this much in common, this affinity for pie dough, and it took me awhile to admit it was anything in common at all.
These things creep up on us, I think, the innumerable ways we can be wrong about ourselves, who we are, and the whole wide the world around us. The connections discovered, too late it seems, but maybe not. The bits and pieces we carry, how they can become invested with meaning, continuing life on and on.
June 26, 2008
Poem in the Post
Kawaii. Today in the post was a “Hello Kitty Everywhere! Haiku Postcard” from my sister. Haiku as follows:
Peeking through the soil,
The flowers shyly emerge.
I am their first friend.
May 13, 2008
Same jeans
Things are mad here. We would suggest that when you’re organizing your mother’s surprise 60th birthday party, you actually bring the bag filled with those party things you’ve spent weeks preparing to the party. This way you don’t leave them in your backyard, discover this after driving two hours to the party venue, and then have to drive all the way back to Toronto (and then back to the venue again) which means you’d drive about 600 km in one Saturday afternoon. This would probably also ensure that you’re not insane at said party, spearheading its descent into rampant debauchery. Who would ever have thought a 60th birthday party could get so out of control? It really truly did, my mother perfectly surprised, particularly to see my sister who lives on the other side of the country. A house full of bright lights, loud music and garish prints, and full of friends, and full of family, and we’re truly fortunate these last two are one and the same. (I would post pictures, but they’re unsightly).
