May 18, 2015

Night and Day

Night

We are going through a difficult period. I like framing it this way because it suggests an ending, as opposed to, We are going through a difficult eternity. “It’s just a phase,” we keep saying. “Things will get better,” but we’re beginning to sound less sure of this. It has been so long. Nearly two years since I’ve had unbroken night’s sleep. And since we came back from England, things have been awful. Iris moved downstairs into Harriet’s room to sleep, but her nighttime wake-ups have continued, plus it’s started taking her sometimes up to an hour to fall asleep, she requires us lying down beside her to do so, and then she gets up again at 11, at 1. She won’t settle unless she’s in bed with us, which would be okay (and I’m certainly not going to fight a screaming nearly-two-year-old in the middle of the night) except that then she flops and kicks and pinches my upper arms. It is unpleasant. And last night we had a babysitter booked so we could go out to a movie, but Iris refused to go to sleep. Or she would be asleep until we dared to rise and leave the room, and then her eyes would snap open and there we’d be again. Eventually, I gave the babysitter $20 and told her to go home, because we’d missed the movie. And it seems like the baby is holding us hostage, when I dare to frame the whole thing like a power struggle (which I shouldn’t do—it only makes unpleasant realities worse). We can’t go out together to anything that starts before 9pm, because no one else but Stuart and I has the patience to put Iris to bed, and now that she’s only staying asleep for 2hrs after that (if she goes to sleep at all), the world seems to have shrunk to the size of an acorn. I know that there are far worse problems to have than this one, but perspective can be hard to come by when one is having melodramatic thoughts about being subject to tyranny. Five years ago, I wrote a blog post about baby sleep books called The Trajectory of a Downward Spiral, but the trajectory of this plot is more like a head smashing into a wall. Repeatedly.

Day

But. We have had the most wonderful weekend. A weekend whose wonderfulness is currently under threat as I spend this holiday Monday morose and bereft at the end of Mad Men. The children watched Annie and ate goldfish crackers in Harriet’s room while Stuart and I watched the final episode this morning. It was so absolutely perfect. Overwhelmingly good. I feel about this show like I’ve been immersed in the narrative for six years, swimming around inside it and examining from all angles. I can’t believe it’s over, but then it isn’t really. We rewatched an episode from Season 1 on Saturday night, and it occurred to me that I’ll never really be done with it. But still, I’m sad there is no more to look forward to. So many of my feelings were invested in these characters. It all mattered a lot to me.

On Saturday, we celebrated summer things with a trip to the Wychwood Barns Farmers’ Market and ate delicious food, and delighted in the fact that our children are old enough to play unattended (in mud puddles, no less) while we sit on a park bench. We also delighted in that our children were so thrilled to take the bus to the market, but were also cool with walking home. So many of my plans for this summer are inspired by Dan Rubinstein’s book, Born to Walk, and I appreciate that Harriet is big enough to be venturing further afield on foot, to be discovering her pedestrian legs without (too much) complaining. But there are also wheels, and so after Iris’s nap, she went on a bike-ride. We’re going to shed the training wheels this summer, we’ve resolved, but this is just one more thing we’re not sure about how to teach her to do—along with shoelace tying. After that, we did our planting, mostly flowers because the squirrels thwart our efforts to grow anything more substantial. Some kale and basil, but otherwise impatiens, and suddenly our deck is beautiful again. The silver maple that shades our house and yard in magnificent bloom. There is a hammock set up underneath it.

Yesterday, we went on our first ravine walk of what is to be many, as we’ve declared 2015 as #SummeroftheRavines. Once again, this is a plan born of Born to Walk—to explore these wild corners of our city. We didn’t have much of a plan and climbed down into the Rosedale Valley via the path behind Castle Frank Subway Station. Unfortunately, Bayview Avenue cuts off our access to the Don Valley, which we weren’t expecting, so we had to climb back out of the ravine in order to get to where we really wanted to be, and by this point, it was nearly time to quit.

But we had fun and the weather was beautiful, and once again, there are very little complaining. We’d compiled a Ravine Walk Bingo sheet, which gave our walk some incentive, as did the promise of lunch afterwards. We went to the House on Parliament and had the most delicious meal, our first patio of the season. And then back to the hammock. I’ve been reading H is for Hawk all weekend, which is not a great read for the emotionally fragile, I am realizing. But it’s really good, deep and layered, and totally weird. So intense. It is possible my whole family will be relieved when I’m finally completed it.

Which brings me to right now where I’ve just been delivered lunch. (“Um, if I’d known you were having lunch in bed, I might not have brought you breakfast there.”) And it’s up to me to save this day from my lugubriousness and histrionics. Iris has started being capable of having actual conversations (albeit stilted ones, usually about dogs), which is extraordinary, and clearly her brain is going wild these days. If I’m able to muster perspective, it would be that these development changes are responsible for our sleep woes. If I am able to focus less on the woe. In a few weeks she will be two. Harriet turns six next Tuesday. For our family, the next month and a bit is a season of happy birthdays and anniversaries and so so many reasons for cake. (Another? My sister is having a baby tomorrow.)

It all goes by so fast.

January 3, 2015

Christmas Vacation

One of many reasons that members of our family are unlikely to ever take the world by storm is that our greatest talents really are for leisure—we’re experts at doing nothing, or just enough of something with requisite amounts of sofa-lying for good measure. We often visit cultural institutions such as museums and art galleries but rarely for more than an hour or two at a time, and never without a trip to the cafe AND the gift shop. Going out for lunch is our main occupation, and we always have dessert. We are really very good at enjoying ourselves, and so the last two weeks have been an absolute pleasure.

Two things: first, that I finished things up so that there was no work at all to be done for a week or so, and second, we turned off the internet. For a week, there was no checking of email or twitter, which opened up vast pockets of time in every day for all kinds of things—reading, playing, baking, carol-singing, and doing the Globe & Mail holiday crossword. On Tuesday we bought the newspaper because we were curious about what had gone on in the world, and it was odd to flip through the pages and discover news items we hadn’t heard about elsewhere.

We spent the first couple of days of our holiday trying in vain to kick the cold that’s been embedded in our heads since the beginning of December. On the Sunday, we went down to the Bay on Queen Street to look at the Christmas windows, which were wonderful, and then went into the store and realized that department stores were the perfect way to reconcile our hatred of shopping malls with the joys of Christmas consumption (glittery lights, perfume smells, shopping bags with string handles, and 1 kilo tins of chocolate. Also, I now own tights without holes in the feet). Speeding home on the subway in time for Iris’s nap and for me to meet friends for an exquisite afternoon tea at Dessert Trends Bistro.

On Monday, we went to the library (because holidaying doesn’t always have to happen on a lavish scale) and then had smoked meat lunch at Caplansky’s Deli. I also went out for dinner with my friends and drank far too much wine. On Tuesday, I don’t think we did anything, partly due to the wine. Throughout all of this, Stuart and I were watching movies and episodes of Midsomer Murders in the evening (because we are 85 years old) and Harriet watched How to Train Your Dragon Two during Iris’s nap times. On Christmas Eve, we went to the Art Gallery to see the Art Spiegelman exhibit and had a lovely brunch at the Frank Restaurant, which we save for the specialist of occasions. On the way home, we picked up our turkey, which we fastened into our stroller. That evening, we had chicken fajitas for Christmas Eve dinner for the 10th year in a row, and left a snack for Santa.

Christmas was so good. Not only did we not have to leave the house, but we got to have my mom come and visit! The children got excellent presents and had fun playing with them throughout the holidays. I received great books, nice clothes, and other lovely things, including a La Cruset butter dish I’d been hankering after and new Pyrex. We all also received new CDs (because are 85 years old and like to do 20th century things) and so the holiday has been extra-filled with music—some of which was even made after 1987, which is very rare for us. My mom arrived and played with the children (which was not very difficult—she arrived bearing her present of a trunk full of dress-up clothes) while Stuart and I set about cooking the best Christmas dinner ever. The joys of Skype brought us the company of Nana and Granddad in England, and our adorable Alberta relations.

On Boxing Day, we went to the ROM, and partook in a yummy dinner of leftovers—Stuart makes the best turkey sandwiches on earth. Iris also slept until 7am for the first time in her whole life, which was mind-blowing, but also a bit terrible because when her sleep for the subsequent week was abysmal, I wanted to pitch her out the window. The next day, my dad and his partner arrived, and we all had an excellent time with them. And they played with the children while Stuart and I cooked up another very good meal—the greatest turkey pot pie of all time whose secret recipe was duck fat. The day after that,  we drove out to my aunt’s in the West end, stopping en-route to buy ice-skates for Harriet and I, which had the potential to be a boondoggle. And then we had a very fun dinner with the best kinds of relations on earth—cousins.

Monday was the best day—Harriet and I headed downtown to meet our friend Erin and watch the new Annie film, which we’d been looking to after avidly viewing its trailers for the past month AND after watching the old Annie every day last summer. The reviews for the new Annie were terrible and all wrong—the movie was wonderful. (That one of the critics referred to the 1982 movie as “an abomination” perhaps suggests that some people had no business reviewing either movie, both of which were masterpieces, in my humble opinion.) We all had such a good time watching it, exuberantly applauding as the credits rolled. And then we met Stuart and Iris and took the subway to Erin’s new house in Bloor West Village, which is very conveniently located near the new Book City (which was bustling and full of wonderful books.)

On Tuesday, I had to take a certain someone to a dermatologists to have a wart examined, which wasn’t so memorable, except that we got to stop at HMV on the way and buy the Annie soundtrack, a move supported by all members of our household. Iris can now sing “Tomorrow”, which is really something to behold. We also love Sia’s version of “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” and the bizarre and catchy “Moonquake Lake”, with its memorable hook—”she’s a fish and he’s a boy.” That night our friends Jennie, Deep and Lilia came for dinner and the best time was had. They were kind enough not to complain about our music selection.

Rumours of boondoggles were averted on New Years Eve when Harriet and I went skating at Christie Pits—Harriet had the best time and loved it, which was good but also troubling as it means that I have to keep going skating. We went again yesterday and both of us were vastly improved. A third jaunt is scheduled for tomorrow. New Years Eve was our traditional chocolate fondue and ringing in the UK New Year before the children went to bed. And then Stuart and I proceeded to play board games (and ping pong, until Harriet came out of her room and asked us to stop because the pinging and ponging was too noisy) until we were done, and then we went to bed and brought in the new year lit by bed-side lamps, turning away from our respective novels for a moment as the clock ticked over to 2015. Which is the best way to ring in the new that I could ever have imagined.

New Years Day was boring—what a wondrous indulgence is that in this day and age? Although we did have our first meal of the year at Fanny Chadwick’s for brunch, which was delicious, and Iris has been transformed into someone who is fairly respectable about restaurant behaviour from all her practice this holiday. And Harriet and I got to play Scrabble for Juniors, which is almost as excellent as spending New Year’s reading in bed. Yesterday we went to the ROM to see the Wildlife Photography exhibit. And yes, more skating. Today we’re doing nothing, which might prove to be a bad idea but feels pretty good from where I sit (on the couch, wearing jogging pants, watching snow falling outside). We’ve kept things a little special with scones with jam and Devonshire cream, because I had a jar of the latter in the fridge and we had to use it up—not the worst task to be charged with.

And I’m writing it all down now mostly so that I can remember it, the holiday we were so desperate for and which so delivered. I’m writing it all down because all these ordinary things (libraries and lunches) are so easy to forget, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to forget either that we’re so blessed with friends and family and each other. If how you spend your days are indeed how you spend your life, then these past two weeks are an indication that we’re doing something right.  And it’s something to hold on to as the lights of December fade—let the next few months be something more than just a countdown to spring.

December 15, 2014

All those dreams I saved for rainy days

One day I want to write about how I met Stuart and life properly began, and how all the energy that I’d previously directed toward trying to make people fall in love with me (and despairing when I always failed) became channelled into useful things. I stopped thinking that “Angie” by the Rolling Stones was a really romantic song. Suddenly my eyes were open and I could see the world, and we began travelling together, learning and growing. I spent a long time before that convinced that I wouldn’t really exist until somebody loved me. This was stupid in retrospect, and contrary to all my feminist principles, but my experience has proven that there was some truth to the notion—that I needed somebody. He’s my enabler in the very best way. And because we met when we were 23, we’ve also grown up together, which is an extraordinary thing to share with someone. When we met, our cumulative possessions would fill two backpacks. Which made it pretty easy for us to run away to Asia a year and half after that, and those experiences would cement our relationship. We’d never argued before—there was so much negotiating and learning involved in figuring out how to live together, and in a foreign country at that. But we made it, stronger for the struggles, and at the end of that adventure, we were yearning for home, so we got married, and began the process of making one here in Toronto, and for two years, we had no money and lived off chickpeas and couldn’t afford to take the subway, and were oh so slim. Whenever I think back to that time now, a part of my brain spends a split-second trying to remember where the children were, until I realize the unfathomable fact—they weren’t there. We didn’t know them. And the paradoxical thought that comes with that one—how miraculous that they’re here at all. I read a line in Gilead today that made me nod, the narrator writing to his son: “…it’s your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.” I know precisely what he means, but I feel it toward my children’s father as well. That there is a Stuart in the world—I will never quite stop marvelling at that. And that he wasn’t always in my world, when he seems as much a part of me as my limbs are—how did I ever get around? Which was probably much of what Mike Reno and Ann Wilson were getting at in their hit song “Almost Paradise (Love Theme From Footloose)”, which is a part of the repertoire in every karaoke room I’ve ever sang in. It’s curious really, because there is no place else you ever hear that song, but it is a karaoke mainstay. We sing it every time we go, at my insistence, and Stuart goes along with it. Though we hadn’t been out for karaoke in ages—not since before Iris was born. But on Saturday night we went out after the children were in bed and we celebrated 12 years since the night we met, and we made wonderful, sweet, terrible unmelodious music together, and came home after midnight.

June 24, 2014

A Good Day

Look what I got! Happy Birthday to me, indeed. I also received a new string of bunting, which means we may have reached Peak Bunting in our apartment. An ideal state, as far as I’m concerned.

March 18, 2014

On Omens and the Dangers of Reading Too Much

One of the most wonderful things I’ve read lately is “Odds and Omens: Superstition and IVF” by Terri Vlassopoulos, not least of all because it is an M Word kind of story,  the kind of tale that gets told and makes so many women feel less alone. And even those of us who’ve not struggled with fertility can identify with what she’s writing about, because anybody who’s ever tried to get pregnant knows what tricks mind and body can play on one another during the two weeks or so before a pregnancy can be detected. I wonder sometimes if it’s a problem particular to those us who read too much, who imagine the world can be interpreted through signs and symbols just like a book.

Terri’s essay also meant something to me, as I’ve been waiting for test results on my thyroid lump for the past two weeks. The good news, we learned this morning, is that the lump is still benign, which always comes as a relief. This is my third round of this, and I am definitely getting used to it. I didn’t really go insane with anxiety  (though I am also not pregnant this time, and can drink!), and all the sleep I lost last night (which was plenty) is on account of my evil children. When I did it last August, I didn’t do too badly either, though the night before my results was this extraordinary evening so golden that I was quite sure I’d receive a fatal diagnosis in the morn, just for the sake of juxtaposition.

The morning of my biopsy appointment two weeks ago, in which I learned that my lump is ever-changing, I’d happened upon three accounts of women with terminal cancer diagnoses. That evening, with my biopsy much on my mind, I checked Facebook to inquire after an old friend of mine who has been living with metastatic breast cancer for the past three years, and discovered that she’d died the day before. Which was perspective, of course, a sign for me to suck it up because I’ve got it lucky in oh so many ways, but also pretty devastating and incredibly sad. Odds and omens indeed.

In some ways, I’m learning how to live with uncertainty. I no longer imagine “biopsy” to be a synonym for “death sentence”. I’ve had so many, and I just call them “tests” now. I have much cause to be optimistic that everything will be fine, and I very nearly am, and then. “What if it’s a trick? What if the universe is screwing with me, getting me all complacent so that when the bad news finally comes, I am so far from ready?” (Though who is ever ready? Sometimes I imagine that worrying is preparation of a kind, though I think I’m fooling myself.)

This is the point at which my husband reminds me that I am not the centre of the universe, that the world has not specifically arranged itself with my interests in mind. That if I’m in fact a character in a book, as I seem to think I am, it’s a book I haven’t finished reading yet, and that there’s no way really to ever know what comes next except to turn the page and see what happens.

December 15, 2013

Snow Day

We have all been so tired this week, and then Iris got really sick on Friday night, so that when Saturday delivered an enormous snowstorm, we decided to call off our plans and do nothing all day. And it was fantastic. The day began with raisin bread french toast courtesy of Stuart, and then I spent the morning reading the newspapers while Iris slept on me and Harriet watched movies.

By this time, the snow outside was swirling and it was beautiful. We had onigiri for lunch, which is a favourite, prepared the bread maker for a fresh loaf, and then I read more papers and got a huge amount of work done on Iris’s Christmas stocking, which is nearly knit. Then Iris took her second nap, and we settled down en-famille to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas. When she woke up, we had a carol sing while I played guitar, though Harriet was bothered at being asked not to accompany on harmonica.

Then we ventured out of doors because we had a few Christmas presents to buy, and all the world was a winter wonderland. Just walking up the street was an adventure. We went to Book City, which has (re) opened its second floor with bargain books for the holiday season. (A long time ago, before the economics downturned, Book City’s second floor was opened all the time with regular books, the store double the size it is now.) It was like 2007 up there, and I remembered the space so fondly. It was lovely to be back there again, plus the selection was fantastic. I got Virginia Lee Burton: A Life in Art for 12.99! We also got Christmas Days by Derek McCormack and Seth, and an Olivia Helps With Christmas board book. (Yes, as ever, we go out to buy books for others, and come home with even more for ourselves.)

When we arrived home again, stamping snow off our boots, the whole house was redolent with fresh baked bread, and I made vegetable soup to accompany the bread while it cooled. We ate dinner, and Harriet even ate the soup, or at least picked through its contents without too much unhappiness. After dinner, we made our last batch of sugar cookies from the dough we made a few weeks back. And then the children went to bed, and after a few awakenings, Iris actually stayed in her bed, at least long enough for us to watch the entirety of the first episode of Broadchurch without interruption. And then I read Alice Thomas Ellis’s The Inn at the Edge of the World–a Christmas book of sorts!–until Iris woke up again, and then it was about time I went to bed too, and Iris came with me and fussed most of the night, but I didn’t mind entirely much because the whole day had been positively wonderful.

October 24, 2013

Lois Lowry!

Seven years ago, I sent Lois Lowry a fan-email to tell her how much her Anastasia Krupnik books had meant to be growing up, and she sent a kind and gracious reply. Three days ago, apropos of a conversation with Helen Spitzer on Twitter, I changed my profile picture to the cover of Anastasia Again! And then today, I discovered that Lois Lowry, Anastasia’s creator, was giving a lecture at the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, mere blocks from my house. Today was also important, because it was Iris’s first time rolling off the couch, which was slightly traumatic, but not so much because she is my second baby. Also because she is my second baby: I can go out whenever I want, even if it’s for the third time in seven days, whereas with Harriet, I didn’t leave the house in the evening for nine months. So I went to the Lois Lowry lecture tonight.

(Yes, I am slightly wired. I don’t sleep much anyway, and then Jennica Harper’s new book turns up in the post, and it’s so good that I’m up late late on Monday reading it. And then yesterday, I discover that Margaret Drabble has a new novel, which is so fantastic that all I want to do is read, and that then today I get to be in the same room as Lois Lowry? Where do weeks like this one come from? [And yes, Iris is fine. Really. No injuries sustained. She actually landed on her bum, which was kind of weird because I looked down and she was just sitting on the floor, and I thought, “How did you get there?”])

Helen phoned me tonight to confirm I was going, and thought she’d stop by a bookstore en-route to pick up some Lowry and cram. What a fantastic idea, I thought, and calculated the unlikelihood of me finishing dinner, doing story-time, feeding Iris, and going to Book City in a twenty-five minute period, leaving enough time to get to the lecture. And then I started remembering Anastasia, and realized I’d never forgotten anything about her ever. I didn’t need to read up. And that she was incredibly important to who I wanted to be when I was young, and to who I am today.

Her parents, Myron and Kathryn Krupnik, and Myron’s old flame Annie, who turned out to be terrible. Anastasia who was in love with Washburn Cummings, who was black and always bouncing a basketball. How her father, a Harvard Professor, criticized her for using the word, “Weird,” which I still never write, because I hear Myron Krupnik saying, “Anastasia, you live in a house that’s full of books. Surely you can come up with a better word than that?” Her baby brother Sam, who was the weird one. One day she walked into a room and there he was, and he told her, “I am eating ice.” How she put her dad’s Billie Holiday albums on the radiator and they melted, and I didn’t know who Billie Holiday was (though I DID know what albums and radiators were), and got confused with Buddy Holly. How Anastasia got a job working for a rich lady called Mrs. Bellingham, and how, echoing her employer, Anastasia referred to residents of a public housing complex as “the great unwashed”, and her father blew a gasket. Her mother was an artist and always splattered with paint, wore jeans. Anastasia had the same reservations that I do about “the suburbs”, though I’d change my mind too if I ended up in a room with a tower. I love how her parents were so intelligent in their parenting, how they treated her like a person. I like how they were individuals in their own rights, with their own first names. These books introduced me to Freud (which was pronounced “Fraud”, I imagined), GertrudeStein (who was Anastasia’s next door neighbour, and she had a fish, I think, and a short-lived marriage with a man called Lloyd, who’d insisted the double L had a y sound). I remember Anastasia’s boyfriend, who was called Steve Harvey and wasn’t at all weird, and how he had no qualms about a girlfriend with glasses and intellectual leanings. Oh, and that other boy, with the briefcase, and how Anastasia had told him that her brother was disabled, which led to an enormous misunderstanding.

I remember buying Anastasia books at the World’s Biggest Bookstore on trips to Toronto, and we’ve forgotten how amazing that store seemed at the time. It was also there that I bought Pollyanna, with a foreword by Lois Lowry, which contained the phrase, “Goodness triumphs. I like that!” which I like very much too, except I misread it as, “Goodness turnips” and thought it a most peculiar expression.

I read her other books too–A Summer to Die, Find a Stranger Say Goodbye. I read The Giver just a few years ago, though it was not so much my thing. She told us tonight that her publisher asked her to stop writing Anastasia books, said her appeal had been exhausted, but never! What a spectacular heroine, smart and utterly herself. Which is what Lowry herself seemed like at the lecture, which was fascinating, funny, touching and wonderful. I left the house in a hurry and forgot to bring a pen and paper, so I didn’t take notes, but that was sort of nice, actually, because I got to just sit back and listen, and it was so enjoyable to do so.

She talked about being born into a family of readers, about being read it and learning to read. About the books that first impressed her, discovering how words worked, learning to tell stories through an elaborate lie she told to impress a counsellor at camp. She talked about her sister who’d died young, and about how, upon her death, she finally understood what a writing instructor had meant when he’d told her that she would need to suffer a loss before she could really write, and how she turned that experience into story. About how she lived in Japan as a child, riding her bike around post-war Tokyo, and the boy she knew but never spoke to, and how they met again on a stage years later when she won the Newbery Award and he was being awarded the Caldecott Medal for Grandfather’s Journey–he was the illustrator Allen Say. She showed us a still from a video of her playing on a Hawaiian beach in 1940 with her grandmother, and how eventually she realizes that it’s the USS Arizona in the background, which would be destroyed just over a year later, all the men on board killed. “And this is what literature is,” she told us. “The putting together of things.”

it was an extraordinary lecture, and something to behold: the actual sight of this woman whose books I’ve been reading for over 25 years now. I will be introducing Anastasia to my daughters, because apparently she’e just come back into print. But in the meantime, I bought Harriet one of Lowry’s books called Gooney Bird Greene, and tomorrow we will read it together.

October 22, 2013

Gift from the Sky

Donna Tartt’s new novel The Goldfinch came out today, and I’ve been looking forward to it. I remember when The Little Friend came out in 2002 and it was such an event. I was very broke, living on cans of tuna and long-life milk, sleeping on the bottom bunk of a bed in backpackers’s hostel in the Midlands. It seems momentous to be buying her new book all these years later, to measure out my own life by Donna Tartt releases: I own a couch now. The intervening decade has been good. So I trekked to the bookstore just now to pick it up, and also to get Kelli Deeth’s new collection The Other Side of Youth. (Read Deeth’s wonderful piece from yesterday about her devotion to the short story form).

So there I was at Book City, and in a hurry too because I had sweet potatoes in the oven, and what do I discover: Margaret Drabble has a new novel!! The Pure Gold Baby, just out at the beginning of this month. I had no idea! Can you believe it? The universe offering up one of my chiefest delights (to be reading a Margaret Drabble for the very first time) like it was nothing. And it’s even meant to be good, this book, and Meg Wolitzer says so. I am so excited. As if yesterday’s bookish gifts weren’t enough…

August 30, 2013

Peach Pie in Progress

The best part of living with me is my insistence upon baking when it is 37 degrees outside. Pictured here is a pie in progress, peach, baked to be taken away on our trip this weekend with my best friend of 20 years and her wonderful family. (When they were just starting to be a family, I wrote about them here. There are three of them now in their family, all excellent.) And I am just checking in right now as we’re waiting to confirm that Iris really is asleep before we watch Mad Men. I had a really wonderful visit to the doctor’s today where it was pretty much confirmed that my career prospects for neck modelling are shot. I am to invest in turtlenecks and pretty scarves, and live with this lump as long as I possibly can. (I can’t help but feel that Nora Ephron had no idea; I also think that if I end up with as few years on earth as Nora Ephron, I am going not to spend none of them feeling bad about my neck no matter how lumpy or eventually scarred it becomes. The great thing about never having been particularly good looking in the first place is that you’re not really losing much when you start to be hideously disfigured.) My biopsy results were inconclusive, as there were so few solids in the sample, but as my lump is cystic, the doctor assures me that the chances of it being cancer are slim. I believe him. This lump will be an ongoing concern, but not so concerning, and anything “ongoing”, of course, means that I am not going to die. It also means that I have to stop getting so excited whenever I have it tested, because it’s going to happen every six months. And so it goes. This is life with a body. I feel very, very lucky.

August 29, 2013

Get up and go

The best lesson this summer has taught us is that sometime you just have to get up and go, and worry about the details later, which is how we’ve made it to Toronto Island, the zoo, and the Canadian National Exhibition in the past two and a half weeks, whereas when Harriet was 12 weeks old, we just sat at home watching her, cowering in fear. Today’s somewhat impractical decision was to go out for dinner at Fanny Chadwicks, because it was a perfect summer night and we’ve been wanting to try out their patio (which has astroturf!). Anyone who has ever met anyone who measures out their years in single digits is well aware that children have a tendency to go berserk after 5pm, which is why lunch is always a much better bet. But no matter. Dinner it was, and so early too that we had the whole patio to ourselves. The light was fantastic, the food was delicious as ever, Iris only squawked like a pterodactyl until the food arrived, and then she sat sweetly in her stroller chewing on a cloth book. Harriet declared her macaroni the best she’s ever had. I drank a pint of beer, which always results in me loving the world ferociously and crying about how beautiful life is. Iris discovered her feet. Stuart ate a slice of lemon cake and decided life was beautiful too. Harriet continued her new habit of telling everyone she loves them, this time our waitress. We did the Mad Libs in Chirp magazine and found them hilarious. And then we walked home glorying in summerness, and marvelling that such a perfect day could arise out of one that began with a family trip to the dentist.

We had no cavities. Obviously.