August 28, 2013
True Confession
Last week on our biannual visit to the mall, I bought gendered Lego. But that’s not the whole story. Read my True Confession here.
August 13, 2013
Going Out With Harriet
During the last weeks of my pregnancy and in the six weeks after Iris’s birth, I wasn’t able to pick up Harriet, and when I was finally permitted to pluck her up again, there was no plucking about it–she’d become enormous. Part of this is actually true–I think a growth spurt took place somewhere around her fourth birthday. And the rest of it is that I spend my time carrying about someone who weighs just ten lbs, and so Harriet at four times the size really is quite large. Once in a while I become struck by her massive nostrils and monstrous thighs, a logical consequence of spending much of my time staring at parts that are baby-sized.
We have been lucky this summer that we’ve had as many parents as kids around all day so that Harriet has not had to suffer too much of a dearth of attention. Though her need for attention has certainly ramped up since her sister arrived, but I am getting the sense that things are settling down and in a few weeks, our whole lives are going to be constructed around Harriet’s school day as much as the presence Iris anyway.
But I have missed Harriet. This I wasn’t conscious of until our week at the cottage when Harriet was often at loose ends, and we ended up spending more time together than we had since the baby came. “Oh, this!” I thought as we worked on her sticker book, when we played “Motor Boat” in the water, had a rainy day picnic on our cottage floor. While I would never say that Harriet and I have a special bond that does not include her father, it is true that we spent most of her entire life together from 9-5, Monday to Friday. And it was very nice to spend that time together again. Nice for her, sure, but nice for me too. It had been awhile.
Yesterday, Iris was asleep in Stuart’s arms and I was suddenly compelled to visit the bookstore. “Come with me!” I asked, and she agreed once I’d promised to buy her a book to make the journey worthwhile. And so off we went, her hand in mine (which remains the greatest privilege of my life), her new purple boots on. We tramped up Brunswick to Bloor, and along the street to Book City, whose staff are some of the loveliest people around. Harriet walks around the store as if she owns it, marching right up to the carousel of paperback books she continually lusts after. The carousel of paperback books I usually never buy, because they’re not real books, I tell her. Not like the picture books proper on the shelf. Commercial tie-ins, I tell her. These books are only toys.
But while Harriet appreciates a good hardback as much as anybody, she is just as devoted to toys, so this argument doesn’t sway her. We buy books from the carousel from time to time, rooting past the Doras (which, thankfully, Harriet has never shown any interest in) and Thomas’s in search of something really good. But this time her attention was caught by a Superman I Can Read book–she is currently very much into Superheros, thanks to The Incredibles and her Daddy’s collection of Spiderman t-shirts. We looked through the Superhero books and I was ecstatic to find Wonder Woman. Harriet leafed through the book and was excited to see an illustration of her carrying a shield. “A shield!” she said. “They have those in How to Train Your Dragon.” There was even a dragon in it, plus the book was $5.
Wonder Woman is iconic in a way that Dora the Explorer will never quite manage to be, plus hers is the ultimate princess story: a princess who didn’t want to be a princess but chose to fight for justice instead. My distaste for commercial tie-ins is fickle. I was happy to buy Harriet that book, and picked up the book I had arrived for: How to Get Along with Women by Elisabeth De Mariaffi. I am also happy because Harriet is now obsessed with Wonder Woman–at 2:30am, Stuart went downstairs to her room and had to ask her to stop “reading” her new books, and go to sleep, please– which means that this morning’s outing will be to our local comic book store in search of a Wonder Woman comic. Two bookstore visits in two days! Harriet has also asked if she could please be Wonder Woman for Halloween, which is the best thing ever. And even better: Harriet asking if might it be more convenient if Wonder Woman fought the forces of evil whilst wearing pants. “Why does she have to wear her underwear?” she wonders, which is a very good question.
But the point of all this is not even books or bookstores, or Wonder Woman. It’s about the joy of walking down the street with my big girl, just the two of us. With all the changes in our lives, what stays constant is that she is excellent company.
August 9, 2013
How the Reading Stacked Up
Thankfully, the black clouds that hung over our vacation at the cottage were literal rather than metaphorical. I’m also glad I didn’t have to be on vacation with a newborn in a heat-wave. It was a funny week, each of wearing the one sweater we’d brought with us every single day. Harriet didn’t have as many playmates as in recent summers, and it was also strange to be on vacation when nobody in the family is working. We didn’t get that same sense of glorious reprieve, but we did get a lot of ice cream, Harriet rode a pony, and I got a lot of reading done. We had to settle for a week away that was good rather than miraculously brilliant, and so we did. We are quite heroic.
I read the short stories in the Barbara Pym book in the days before we left. Upon arrival, Russell Hoban’s Turtle Diary was first up, which Jared Bland writes about in the Globe this week. It’s a difficult, funny and terribly sad novel, just the kind of novel you’d think the man who wrote Frances would author. Though I found the ending strangely uplifting, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to. I reread Joan Didion’s Where I Was From next, my first reread, and I adored it. It was fascinating to see it in the context of Blue Nights and Magical Thinking, in the context of a trilogy. Her California is my land of dreams. I read The City is a Rising Tide next, the novel by Rebecca Lee whose Bobcat and Other Stories has so enchanted me. Truth was this was really a very long short story instead of a novel, but I loved it because I’ve become quite fond of Rebecca Lee’s writing and there it was. An ARC of Ann Patchett’s essay collection next, and you’ll be hearing more from me on that in the future. And then Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which seems to be the book of the summer in my circles. I really don’t do fantasy, and any exposure I have to fantasy underlines this (A Wrinkle in Time notwithstanding, curiously), but the Gaiman book was short and its realist elements were so compelling. I loved it. Perhaps my problem with fantasy is that all the novels are 800 pages long.
We’d already made our annual pilgrimmage to Bob Burns Books in Fenelon Falls, Stuart picking up a stack of Terry Pratchetts, Harriet getting a couple of picture books as well as a Vinyl Cafe story collection (Stuart remarks that we’re trying to save her from nerdom by trying to undermine her dragon obsession. I suggest her obsession with Stuart McLean is just another kind of nerdom), and I got The Round House by Louise Erdrich, which I’m going to be reading in the next few weeks. And then on Wednesday, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to function unless I got my mitts on a Louise Penny book, and so we went back to Bob Burns (just before we had Afternoon Tea at the Fenelon Museum) and I got The Cruellest Month, which was so scary and wonderful. I have become a Louise Penny fanatic, and seem to have overcome my initial aversion to her weird sentence fragments.
I finished The Cruellest Month at home, and then read Pym’s Civil to Strangers. And now all week I’ve been reading The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, as instructed by Ann Patchett, actually. I’ve also been busily writing, which the Paley has aided, I think.
And now we’re into August, which makes September seem almost inevitable. And the truth is, I am pretty excited. This summer has been the sweetest gift, the most wonderful dream. Iris is nine weeks old, growing so fast, and I am so grateful that we’ve had this time in which to enjoy her, her brand new babyhood, and each other. But the transition to September is going to come about naturally, I think, with Harriet beginning Junior Kindergarten, Stuart returning to work and also taking on some pretty cool new opportunities, and me returning to work at 49th Shelf. I’m actually really looking forward to it, and other exciting projects and events I’ll be involved in this Fall. Um, not to mention that I have a book coming out in the spring, which has not been so much at the forefront and I nearly forget it is really happening.
Posting here will remain irregular over the next few weeks as our family works to get the most out of summer (and as I vow to read as many books as possible before Real Life sets in again). We’ve got a trip to Toronto Island still before us, as well as a visit to the zoo, get-togethers with friends, afternoons in the park, patio lunches, the CNE, and a long weekend trip to Grand Bend with our friends. I also have a doctor’s appointment to determine just what exactly what we’re going to do about my enormous thyroid, which I am looking forward to being done with.
But why am I even telling you this? You’re not reading anyway. I know you’re outside drinking up the goodness of summer, or at least if you’re not, you should be.
July 15, 2013
The Wild Rumpus
I learned about Story Mobs on Friday, and knew immediately what we’d be up to the next day. What an adventure: “where great kids’ books meet flash mobs with a dash of Mardi Gras thrown in.” Our family met up with many others in a small park behind Nathan Phillips Square on Saturday afternoon with our maracas on hand, along with wolf ears and a copy of Where the Wild Things Are. Now, we have a newborn in the family and we’re quite crap at organization (wolf ears created 10 minutes before we left the house), so our preparations paled in comparison to those of others who were exquisitely attired and were carrying amazing props. We took part in a rehearsal of the story’s reading, and then made a parade with all the other wild things to the pool in front of City Hall where we drew attention with strange costumes, samba drums, and the general oddness of our presence. The story began, featured readers projecting their voices across the square and the rest of us participating with responses. My favourite part is when we got to shout: “Oh, please don’t go. We’ll eat you up! We love you so.” Though the wild rumpus itself was nothing to be scoffed at as we danced like wild things around Nathan Phillips Square with a bunch of similarly-minded strangers in the sunshine. (The Ai Weiwei sculptures in the pool added nicely to the effect, I think.) And then Max sailed back in and out of weeks to his very own room where his supper was waiting. It was still hot, which deserved a cheer, we thought, and then we scattered, and the event was over as though it had never begun, except for in the minds of those of us who were there.
Another Story Mob is scheduled for two weeks from now with Jillian Jiggs being performed. Thanks to Bunch Family for bringing this fabulous event to my attention!
July 5, 2013
One Whole Month of Iris
When I wrote “Love is a Let-Down”, the point was not to say that new motherhood is necessarily a terrible experience, but instead to underline how different it is for everyone. That for many of us, the experience didn’t align with the greeting card slogans. We’re not over-the-moon but instead completely overwhelmed by a world that has been shattered into pieces and put back together in a still-broken state. And now I worry that in my current state of mind I’m letting down the team a little bit, undermining the message of those who’ve dared to speak honestly about what it is to become a mother. But then again, I’m really not undermining it at all, but instead underlining my main point which is that every woman comes to motherhood in her own way. Because this time, with my second baby, the experience has been everything it wasn’t first time around. I’ve become a walking greeting-card slogan myself—“Everything is going really well!” If I wasn’t living it, I’d be convinced I was lying.
Of course, anyone who’s ever had a second baby will tell you that this is what happens. They told me, actually, but I didn’t believe them, or else I certainly didn’t believe that it could be possible for someone like me who was so notoriously terrible at new motherhood. That this time you know what you’re doing, you learn to ride the chaos instead of thinking you’re doing it wrong, that it all goes by faster and you really do try to enjoy every minute.
It is a different experience altogether. That first baby requires “becoming a mother”, which comes less naturally to some of us than others. I’m reminded of the trauma undergone by astronauts when they re-enter the earth’s atmosphere–my experience was the emotional equivalent of that. But this time, I’m a mother already and there is no becoming necessary. There is none of the shattering, the loss of self that was so terrifying to experience. I am fundamentally unchanged by the birth of Iris, except that our family is a different shape and the world is just a little bit bigger.
Motherhood is a storm, is the quote by Laurie Colwin that I seized on, the metaphor that so clearly articulated what I was going through. But it’s not been stormy this time. Instead, I’d say it’s been like a summer’s day, albeit one sometimes experienced from my bed but with the patio door wide open and the sun pouring in. The baby is screaming, her face so red that I’m reminded of a cartoon character with smoke coming out its ears, but this is funny instead of traumatic. I’ve got living proof asleep in a bedroom downstairs that this wretched, squalling foetal creature is in fact going to grow into an actual human being. And so that’s how one becomes a greeting-card slogan, all consumed by how fast the days are flying by and by the smell of the baby’s head.
It has been a good month. My husband has been a huge part of this. Whereas the early days of Harriet challenged our relationship like nothing else, we have been so kind to one another since Iris arrived. That he is able to be on parental leave means that the hardships weigh more equally on both of our shoulders. He has taken extraordinarily good care of me during my recovery. And as I’ve recovered, we have had fun together, with Harriet too when she wasn’t yelling at us. (We now understand why people enroll their children in camp all summer long.) And now that I am nearly recovered, a brilliant summer lies before us. It’s all more graspable than I dared to imagine it was.
We went out for lunch today (of course) to celebrate a month of Iris, and to toast to the three of us for so successfully weathering the last few weeks. And now Harriet’s asleep and Iris is squawking downstairs, so I must go down to feed her, but while I do, we’ll be watching The Hour, which is so so good, and this nightly television thing is the most excellent ritual. Previously, we’d both worked in the evenings and TV was a treat saved for Friday nights (with wine) but now every night is Friday night, and how can you fault a life like that? It might as well be July. And it actually is.
Iris is gorgeous when she sleeps, slightly weird looking awake, and entirely beloved by every member of her family. Her most remarkable attribute was that she was born with a tooth. We are curious about who she’s going to grow to be, but we love her already. She looks a bit like her sister, but more like her self, and a little bit like me who also had ginger eyebrows as a baby. She is usually asleep or calm when people meet her, undermining her reputation as a miserable person. She likes to sleep in my bed in my armpit, which is a bit counter to what the safe-sleep advocates say, but I guess we like to sleep dangerous. I think we’re safe though, because she doesn’t really sleep that much. She took a soother once, and I was overjoyed, but hasn’t done it after. Since her birth a month ago, she’s gained two whole pounds, which is amazing. She gazes at Harriet like she looks at no one else, though I’ve gazed at Harriet myself so I can’t say I blame her. Her mouth is beautiful. She also likes to fall asleep on people’s chests, and she’s not yet discriminating about whose. Her belly button is shaped like an @ sign. She screams a lot and hates most things, but still manages to be adorable. And there is not really much else one can say when describing someone her age, but we’re so excited to get to know more and more about her.
June 18, 2013
A Happy Anniversary
We enjoyed a nice date over a delicious breakfast out this morning with Iris asleep in the sling, and had a good time thinking of how far we’ve come since our seaside wedding eight years ago. Or even more remarkable, how far we’ve come since the last time we had a two-week old and I spent all my time sprawled half-naked on the carpet and crying…
June 16, 2013
Oh, Father’s Day
Oh, Father’s Day– I’ve got a good dad myself, and so do my children. And never am I more grateful to my co-parent than right now when we’re both adrift in newborn land. I bought Stuart’s Father’s Day presents (A Users Guide to Neglectful Parenting and Jamie Oliver’s Great Britain) a month ago because I remembered how the day got lost after Harriet was born. Amazed to find how much further along we are this time around though–I got up this morning and made us pancakes. We also have intentions of heading out for lunch today, which is brave of us. We’ll see how that goes. Yesterday we went on a picnic and Iris slept through it, which was some mark of success. I still can’t walk so far so it was a picnic on a patch of grass close to home, but it was sunshine, fresh air, fun and being in the world. Which feels like a miracle, actually. I am very proud of us, though of course it has not been all smooth sailing. The nights have been hard and if I could describe Iris’s general temperment, I’d have to employ the term “miserable”. In my experience of babies, this is fairly typical, though I’d been hoping to get something different this time around, one of those elusive “chilled out” babies you hear about sometimes. But it was not to be, and we’re exhausted. Last night, for just the second time in two weeks, we managed to get two three-hour blocks of sleep, which makes today feel quite glorious. Anyway, the fact is that without Stuart, none of this would be working at all. The greatest lesson of everything that went wrong after Harriet was born was that I need so much more support than I’d figured, that without that support, I’d fall apart. And Stuart has been amazing at providing that support, at making the nights not seem lonely, at keeping food and drink coming to help me get better, at keeping Harriet happy, at rocking Iris to sleep, at listening to my kvetching and fears and making nothing seem quite so bad. He’s working as hard as I am, which makes everything so much easier, and I’ve never been more aware of how lucky we are to have him in our lives.
June 13, 2013
Hobbling Out in the World
We made it to the Farmers Market yesterday, my first outing since coming home from the hospital. I had to hobble there while clutching my incision, and for the first time ever, we had to implore our slowpoke daughter not to walk so fast, but we made it and it was lovely to be in the world, even if the soundtrack was a bagpiper dueting with steel drummer on a version of Jamaica Farewell. We also came home with strawberries and raspberries, so it was definitely worth the trek. I’ve elected to spend today in bed though, partly because I don’t want to overdo it, and also because Iris was up most of the night, scarcely sleeping for more than an hour at a time.
It still remains true how much easier this experience of having a newborn baby has been. Part of this is because we skipped the stage where Baby loses 11% of her body weight and breastfeeding is as difficult as it is constant. Iris had surpassed her birth weight as of Monday and she’s doing very well, bouts of misery aside (which can be attributed to diagnosis:Baby). Partly because we knew what to expect in terms of the all-night fussiness and the problems which have no solutions. (This time I have not once paged the midwife because the baby refuses to go to sleep.) I am not resisting having Iris in bed with us when required, which was a huge hurdle before–everyone had warned that it was the slippery slope to the end of life as we know it, but now I know that it isn’t. I have not googled anything newborn-related to seek advice from uninformed, hysterical women who are as desperate as I am, and as I result, I do not feel so desperate. The holy trinity of a queen-sized bed, my smart-phone in the wee hours and the placenta pills continue to bolster us. My husband who is not going back to work anytime soon. All these things are making these days quite different than the last time we went through them. Also the knowledge that these are probably the last time we’ll go through them. It seems to me that having a second baby is like getting a tattoo after all.
When we went out into the world yesterday, I was not surprised to discover it was still there. It doesn’t seem surprising that life has gone on normally while our family has been changed forever. Iris’s arrival has not so shaken the foundation of our existence as Harriet’s did, mostly because we were parents already and have not had to weather the explosion of becoming so, and also because Harriet herself ties us to the world, to the pattern of ordinary days. Stuart gets up in the morning and takes her to school, and she comes home with dispatches from the world beyond the four walls of my room. She demands meals and bedtime, stories read, games played. “Pay the most attention to me,” she demands, ever comfortable with voicing her needs. And so we have not been able to be sucked into that funnel cloud of newborn mania, crazed internet searches, middle of the night despair, logs of inputs and outputs. Downstairs we have the Hospital for Sick Children Baby Care book, and if you open it you will find the marginalia of a madwoman. There is a chapter on sleep habits, and I went through it with a pen underlining every single bit of text. Obviously, the notes were unhelpful, and I’ve not opened that book in quite some time.
Which is not to say that I didn’t cry this morning after being up all night when the bad baby still wouldn’t settle. But I had a nap and then I felt better, and I’m looking forward to walking a little bit farther tomorrow.
June 8, 2013
How Iris arrived
It really was a very gentle time, the weeks we spent waiting for Iris to come. I spent last Friday evening bouncing on a ball to induce labour, made absolutely miserable, and then my husband discovered that if you bounced on a birthing ball to terrible hiphop ballads, the whole experience was made more fun. Though looking back, I realize it was probably for the best that my labour was not brought on by bouncing to Usher singing Love in this Club. And I absolutely adore the photo of me in my bathing suit from last week, the gloriousness of it all, though it’s all sort of bittersweet when I compare that image to my poor ravaged body today.
Here it is: I am so so happy. I know I am only four days postpartum, and probably hormones have something to do with the happiness as well, but they’re supposed to. “I never imagined it could be like this,” but this means something very different now. And I know the experience of my birth, although it was far from ideal, really has something to do with this. Oh, how much it matters how the baby arrives. I know this for sure now, but in a more nuanced way than when I was ranting a few weeks back.
My labour began on Sunday night after we’d eaten much of Barbara Pym’s Victoria Sponge, although it was not apparent to me that it was labour until Monday around noon. I spent Monday night awake every ten minutes with contractions, but then by morning they were gone. A visit to the midwives on Tuesday showed that things had been progressing, even without the contractions. They started again Tuesday night with a great deal of trouble on my behalf, and we were up all night again, sure that this was it. The midwives arrived with birthing supplies and found me dilated to 6 cm. But the contractions never got stronger and once again were gone in the morning. The midwives came later that morning with the intention of breaking my water, but then the baby’s heart-rate was troubling–she was not responsive enough. And while she was stable, it was scary, and there was no longer very much natural about my “natural” birth. I just wanted the baby out.
We took a cab to the hospital, both of us crying–partly because we knew our birth plans were out the window, because we were scared for the baby, and also because we knew we were leaving Harriet without having prepared her for this. (She was at school at the time, would be cared for by our wonderful friend Erin until my mom arrived to stay with her here.) It was cold and grey outside, and as we drove past a high school, a group of boys threw rocks at our car. The world seemed quite horrible and we kept crying–I have never seen a taxi driver more concerned about his fares (and so maybe the world was not so horrible after all).
En-route to the hospital, I started having contractions again, which continued as we waited in triage. The OB on-call found it odd that someone dilated 6cm was not progressing, and give me the option of induction, which I had no intention of taking. (“It’s going to need a lot of drugs to work,” she said, again, a far cry from natural.) But still, that she give me a choice made the decision to do a repeat c-section one that I could own, and I am grateful for that. Which is not to say that I wasn’t weeping in the OR, so much so that the staff was confused–never had a sadder woman been about to give birth. Situation compounded by an anaesthesiologist who I think forgot I was a human being as she handled my body pre-surgery. The student midwife came over to comfort me with casual conversation though–I think she said, “So what’s the first thing you’re going to eat when you can eat again?” And obviously, the answer was chocolate croissants, and seriously, that woman changed my world around. By the time Stuart was brought in in his scrubs, I was comforted and ready, and knew we had made the best and only choice.
Iris means rainbow, and Malala is a hero. The midwives knew how troubled I’d been having never seen Harriet until she was wrapped and hatted when she was born, and so when they pulled her out and brought her to the warming bed, I knew just where to look and Stuart snapped a photo. She was amazing, purple, and she was mine, ours. I knew it instantly. Because of Harriet, there is a part of my heart that is mother-love now, and Iris resided there immediately. I cried and cried, like I’ve cried just one time before, at the birth of Iris’s sister. Our girl was finally here. Our family was complete. It meant something that we’d been waiting so hard for her, that I had been supported so much in my intentions for VBAC, and that Iris herself had been trying as hard to come to us–they discovered the cord was wrapped around her neck four times and there was no way she would have made it out on her own, and an induction would have been a disaster.
They didn’t lie, all those people who told me it would be different the second time around. That first night as Iris fed all night long, Stuart having to deliver her from one side to another as I was unable to move, I didn’t sit there wishing we could leave her and run away. I knew already that the objective to such a night wasn’t getting the baby to sleep, that the baby was doing nothing but simply being a baby. The goal of the night, I knew, was to get through it as best we could, which we did, aided by the fact that Iris has breastfed like a champion since being 40 minutes old.
We left the hospital yesterday–turns out they can boot you out after 2 days now, which is kind of unbelievable, but we were good to go, and eager to get home to Harriet. The surgery has left me brutalized–I think my surgeon 4 years ago was a master of the art, because I was out for walks last time and today I can barely move. Midwives have assured me that my previous experience was the exception to the rule. And I hate that, feeling so badly, but it’s also not so bad being confined to my bed. I’m reading Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which I love. Stuart is bringing me snacks and meals. We prepared for all of this by buying a queen-sized bed last winter, which is so comfortable, and I also got a smart phone a few weeks ago, knowing it would make this kind of thing easier, still being connected to the world. The postpartum crazies also have yet to arrive–they were knocking at the door last night, but then were followed by the woman I’ve paid to make capsules of my placenta, which are meant to help balance hormones. She dropped off the pills, I started taking them, and I’ve been feeling cool ever since. No weeping even! Maybe it will all kick in tomorrow, but in the meantime, I’m happy to take good days where I find them.
Iris, as we know her so far, is marvellous. She arrived and looked like an elderly frog, the next day like a dinosaur, but now she just looks like Harriet did, but with fairer colouring. She practices smiling in her sleep, and midwives reported today that she’s doing great. Her mood could be assisted by the fact that her mother is not a lunatic. She’s just three ounces down from birth weight and we no longer need to wake to feed! Because of my previous experience, when Harriet lost so much weight, I’ve been breastfeeding with great persistence (which is not so heroic–Iris is content to let me read while doing this) and it seems to have paid off. It’s so good to be home and Stuart is taking such good care of me. Harriet is the big sister beyond my wildest dreams, her bond with Iris already making us swoon, and she is displaying such annoying and atrocious behaviour in addition to this that we know she is in fact fully processing the change in our family and we won’t have to wait for another shoe to drop.
So there it is. Everything is wonderful. Just four days in, and I know you have to take good times one day at a time just like the trying ones, but it really means something. Four days postpartum with Harriet I was in pieces already. I was so scared to go through all this over again, and I am so relieved and grateful that this is different. That the gentle times continue. Knock wood, of course, and there will be challenges ahead, but I’m pleased that there really is a chance that I’ll be strong enough to meet them.
And thank you to so many friends for support and best wishes. We are a very lucky family.
May 12, 2013
Every Day is Mother’s Day…
…when one is self-absorbed and self-indulgent (hello! Over here! Waving!!). And every day is doubly Mother’s Day when one is 38.5 weeks pregnant, but today in particular. My own excellent mom was kind enough to let me lounge around at home and be the centre of the show with my little family (though we’re looking forward to seeing her next weekend). I was given tea and croissants in bed this morning, and a gift from said little family–the book Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which my clever husband had noticed me to eyeing in the bookstore last weekend. I think it will make an excellent post-baby read. And then I was left alone to reread the wonderful poetry collection Arguments With the Lake, which I’ll be reviewing later tonight. But that wasn’t all! Today, I was informed, we’d be having Afternoon Tea at Dessert Trends. And it was delightful, delicious and fun.
Harriet was a bit challenged by the constraints of afternoon tea today, but she managed to hold it together, and we understood why she was not quite at her best. Yesterday had been her 4th birthday party (celebrated 2 weeks early due to baby’s imminent arrival) and perhaps an ice cream party and afternoon tea are too much for one weekend when you are just 206 weeks old. It is also possible that the fancy green tea eclairs weren’t entirely suited to her palate, though she found the scones and jam quite acceptable, mango tart as well. We were very happy to eat whatever she couldn’t manage.
Her birthday party yesterday was a splendid success! It was held at The Big Chill Ice Cream Parlour, and attended by 12 of her marvelous friends who were surprisingly very enthusiastic about the game I’d entitled “Disappointing Pass the Parcel” in which the parcel was filled with citrus fruit. They were also very good at “Pin the Scoop on the Sundae”, and nobody mentioned that I am the world’s worst party-game planner. We had hot dogs, ice cream AND cupcakes, so all the food groups were met. Harriet was a spectacular birthday girl who made me very proud, and she had fun, which was the most important thing of all.
Her friends and their families kindly contributed birthday gifts via Echoage, which puts half the gift toward a charitable donation (Harriet picked The Stop, and is quite excited that they’re getting a gift for her birthday) and the other half toward the purchase of her first bicycle. We went to buy the bike today, and were thrilled to get the Norco Rainbow bike. The weather today was disgusting, so she wasn’t able to ride it properly, but still mastered the art of pedaling via riding around up and down the hallway, which was very exciting. Can’t wait for the sun to come out again so we can hit the sidewalk!
