Bibliomama

A few days ago Eve texted me from school to say her BFF's mother had given her permission to go off school grounds during recess to Tim Horton's for an iced capp, so Eve wanted to know if I was okay with her going too, even thought they're not technically supposed to leave school property during recess until next year. I said yes. She then sent me this: THEN once they got back to school she asked me to text her saying I'd dropped off their iced capps at the front desk, in case anyone asked where they got the iced capps. Then she deleted all the texts except the one I sent. Total badass, that girl. **************** She gave me this card for Mother's Day: ***************** I was hanging out with her BFF's Mom after she took all the girls to Comic Con for BFF's birthday. They were talking about how girls still send nude pictures and the other mom and I were goggling and despairing. Then the BFF said "one guy asked me for pictures. So

Or doing much of anything, if I'm being honest. I'm done all but three and a half hours of my work placement and I was looking forward to a quiet week with Matt gone AGAIN, but I kind of miss working, and I can't settle to any wholehearted loafing and it's been mostly too cold to walk much (yes, I do have a treadmill now that you mention it, how kind and helpful, shut up). I went to a Lumineers  (and Kaleo , swoon) concert with friends that was wonderful even way up in the cheap seats, then I had book club, which was great, and not only because I actually managed to go to the right house this month (don't ask), and yesterday I finally started cooking again after a few weeks of an absolutely pathetic showing in the kitchen. I also made a couple of significant phone calls, to book driving hours for Angus and pay off a forgotten FedEx taxes and duties bill, so, you know, that used up a fair number of spoons. I still have to make a doctor's appointment for me, make

So after begging the Ottawa Public Library to let me work for them for free since September, I finally got the go-ahead to start my placement hours. On a Monday. In February. When Matt had just left for Asia for two weeks. And it was about to snow continuously for three days. And I had my period. But that's okay. It's fun. Most of my shifts are at the super-busy nearby branch where I run around like a headless chicken all day from project to project and feel desperately needed. I sat in on baby time. I wrangled kindergartners during classroom visits. I cut out ten felt umbrellas and six big ducks and one baby. I catalogued a filing cabinet full of creepy nursery-rhyme shapes. I had "Five Green Speckled Frogs" running through my head for four days straight. Remember when I complained about having to learn Excel in my coursework? Guess what I had to use on my VERY FIRST DAY? and remembered nothing about and had to fake until I figured it out? My other shifts are

So I should totally be throwing up a new Newbery Medal Post, or blogging about Blissdom, but my cold sort of suspended itself for the week-end and then came rushing back full force when I got home (not complaining, really it was the best I could hope for) and I've read more Newbery books but I don't feel equipped to post much more than "um, good" or "meh", or "my physiotherapist thinks it's taken me a month to read The Cricket in Times Square because I only read it at Physio because it's light enough to hold in one hand - I think she suspects that I'm simple". And tonight we had one of those great family dinners that made me remember why I force us to have family dinners so I'm going to take the easy way out. Matt: "I registered you for Take Your Kid to Work Day on November 5th" Angus: "Why did you have to register me?" Photo by Didriks Matt: "I don't know. Something about safety concerns."

I always kind of liked grocery shopping with the kids when they were babies. They usually slept or looked around and I felt a sense of accomplishment at the end. Unless we got caught in the rain on the way back to the car. When they were toddlers it was even better. I'd plunk them in the front of the cart and they would make lion noises or eat a cookie or a cheese bun (yes, I always paid for it) and we would make silly comments about whatever we were buying and they would entertain the other shoppers. But when you have little kids, it always feels like a treat to be allowed to run any kind of errand by yourself. You feel almost weightless - no solid little body to swing from car seat to grocery cart, no worrying about losing someone in the produce maze, no stopping little hands from dropping a watermelon on the bread. So when they started school, I would go grocery shopping when they were in class. And now we've come full circle, where it's kind of a treat when they'

I haven't had the best week, physically or emotionally. It's the kind of thing where nothing is terribly wrong, but enough things are not quite right that it adds up to a medium-high degree of suckage. I've upped my exercise, which is great, but I need new orthotics, so the easiest exercise - walking on the treadmill - leads to pain and inflammation of my right sciatic nerve, knee, shin and ankle. My chiropractor, who orders my orthotics, is nice and close and easy to get to, but our insurance company demands a prescription every time I get orthotics - which is really stupid, my feet are fucked up and I'm never NOT going to need them, so clearly this is just the insurance company's way of making it more of a pain in the ass to file a proper claim. My doctor, who can give me the prescription, is downtown, which means I have to call the office to make the appointment (on the phone, which I don't like) and then drive downtown (which I also don't like). So I kee

I was raised Catholic. Easter week-end was basically one really long Church service after another. From the time I was twelve or so, I was in the choir or playing the organ, so there was also a bunch of rehearsals and getting their extra early for Easter Sunday mass, which was often the day after the spring time change, making it even earlier. Once when I was in university, my parents were visiting and my mother and I were going to Good Friday mass, and a guy in our residence said he'd come with us. As we left the church three hours later, he exclaimed, with several expletives, that he was trying to expiate his Irish Catholic guilt by going to one service for Easter and had figured this would be the short one. My mother almost died laughing. Photo by Matthew Sabo When I went to McMaster and belonged to the university choir, the choir director asked me to join his church choir and picked me up for rehearsals and mass for a few months. I remember singing a version of "Were

This week has been - not bad, exactly, but wonky. After the book fair, which wasn't overly onerous but did deplete my introvert tank a little, and then having the kids home and extra kids here for project-completing and babysitting here on Friday, and then the dinner party on Saturday, I was feeling depleted. Then I felt more sick (when I'd been sick but feeling better) or sick again. Then the weather got blustery and my head went all thumpy. I'm out of sorts. I drop stuff. I bump into stuff. Solid glasses seem to leak when I try to drink out of them. This morning in the shower I punched myself in the face. I think maybe I was reaching for something and my face got in the way, but I'm not sure - I probably knew before I got punched in the face, but then I experienced some short-term memory loss. I'm feeling like I've provided a less-than-stellar showing in NaBloPoMo and wishing I'd done some more preparation, so I had a hook, or a theme, or at least some wei

My dad used to drive me and my sister and our friends all over the place. My friends were bad enough, but my sister had some who raised even my sanguine father's eyebrows with what they were willing to discuss with him sitting there, from their crummy marks to boy problems to their "red friend" (he tells about that one repeatedly). This morning I drove over to Angus's school with him at seven to pick up five other volleyball players and drive them to another school for a tournament. At the end of the day, I went back to watch them play the final (they won) and then drove them all home. My experience with driving Angus and teammates has been mostly confined to a couple of baseball players or a basketball guy who gets in, sticks in his earbuds, says nothing for the entire drive and grunts in a faintly grateful manner on his way out. So I wasn't sure what to expect. Turns out a bunch of thirteen-year-old boys are not appreciably different from my sister and her fri

Kim was in town for the week, it was a beautiful day and I had been away for the week-end and missing my kids. Angus had to go to a track meet, so I kept Eve out of school and we went downtown to meet Kim at the National Gallery . Kim is one of those people who doesn't have or want children, but has a gift for talking to them without sounding fake or forced or like she'd rather be doing something else. Eve always enjoyed hanging out with Kim, and she loves art. And you know, there are many times when Eve displays a maturity and perceptivity far beyond her years. This was not one of those times. Kim said she really wanted to see the Drawings and Photographs because she always leaves them for the end and then doesn't have time for them, so we started there. There was a lot of contemporary aboriginal art, including pieces by Annie Pootoogook , which makes me sad because she's been in the Ottawa newspaper several times and I know that her living situation is heartrendin

Remember when Eve and I talked a little about the facts of life and then she didn't want to talk about it any more? Turns out we should have talked about it a little more. Yesterday she was telling me about school. She said that they knew they were having health class and the grade fives in her class (she's in a four-five split) were afraid they were going to talk about where babies come from. (Let me interject that I felt the slightest bit smug about the fact that I thought Eve knew where babies come from, in a gigantic pride-goeth-before-a-fall douchebag moment). It turned out they were actually studying germs. But Eve said one of her classmates said "I know where babies come from. A man and a woman make them." Then EVE said "two women can make a baby". What now? I looked up from whatever I was chopping. She said her friend disagreed, but she got someone else to corroborate. I said "were you joking?" (please god, say you were joking). She lo

Why do I even bother putting stuff in draft form? Every time I'm stuck for a blog post I look at the drafts folder and everything there is as useful as tits on a bull. Once I saw Teri Garr on Letterman and she said she always writes things down on cue cards so when she goes on talk shows she'll have witty comments ready, and then right before she goes on she looks at them and they say things like "Khadafi goes to Moscow. Chicken on a stick". That's how it goes with me and draft posts. Both my kids have birthdays at the beginning of a month. Since they were actually born on those days, at the beginning of those months, one could argue that it's been happening this way for as long as I've known them, and one would be indisputably correct. One might wonder why, then, I never realize that I have to get my ass in gear for birthday-party-type preparations not too late in the month BEFORE the aforementioned birthday months, if we don't want to be scrambling

I went out to get some groceries tonight since Matt's leaving for Asia early on Saturday and the kids don't have piano/guitar on Monday afternoon, which is when I usually get groceries for the week. I also went to the public library. This means I did my Monday errands on Thursday. I can't figure out if this puts me ahead or behind. Eve came and hung out with me and the librarian while I was shelving books in the school library. She found a Roald Dahl book that she hadn't read yet and the librarian checked it out for her even though she already has her two books checked out for the week. She then danced around the library singing "I'm so happy, I have so many books", confirming that she is indeed my child. On the way home someone on the radio referred to someone (from Liberia) as Liberian and she sighed dramatically and said "I can't STAND when they don't speak properly - is it so hard to say LIBRARIAN?" And you must never, ever tell her

Eve is fairly mature for an almost-ten-year-old. She expresses herself pretty well and has a reasonably extensive vocabulary. For this reason, I sometimes forget that she is, in fact, only nine years old and sometimes she doesn't catch all the nuances of a given situation. Usually it's not hard to figure out when she gets confused, because she huffs out "This is too confusing!" and flounces away, but sometimes she doesn't say anything and it's only much later that it becomes clear that she was completely in the dark. Case in point: The final Harry Potter movie. Angus was going to the premiere with a friend and the friend's little brother was going so she begged us to take her too even though she hadn't read all the books or had them read to her. So we did. She said she liked it. Then later she was talking about the scene where Snape is watching his memories in the pensieve and he remembers finding Harry's mother dead after Voldemort kills her. It

It's been a while since we had a good Esso episode around here. But last night I took Angus to the chiropractor and on the way home he asked what we were having for dinner. I had been out all day and I was feeling lazy, so I didn't actually want to make the pizza that I had bought the pizza toppings for, but I knew we had naan bread in the freezer that I could use for pizza crust. So I said "naan pizzas". He said "so what are we having?" I looked at him quizzically and said "what did I just say?" and he said "well if it's not pizza, what is it?" Then we picked up Eve at my Mom's and had the same conversation, until I finally spelled it out: "NOT n-o-n pizzas, n-a-a-n pizzas!" They liked them. Eve now calls them anti-pizzas. Then in the middle of the night, my husband having wandered his restless legs off somewhere else already, Angus came in and said he'd had a really bad nightmare and crawled in with me. Matt,

I was driving Angus to school on Friday. It was -18 with the windchill. We stopped at a red light out around the corner, which put us right in front of two girls he knew waiting at the bus stop. I said "should we offer them a ride?" He said "NO!" I said "why the hell not? It's freezing out." He said "It would be too weird! Stop looking at them!" I said screw you and rolled down his window and asked them if they wanted a ride. They giggled and said no thank-you. I rolled up the window and said "Great. I'm an embarrassing mother all around. My work here is done." A few days ago I found a sheet of paper on the dining room table with Angus's name on it. It looked like a sheet of questions that he was answering in order to describe himself. I asked him if we needed to do anything with it and he said I could just recycle it, but I put it on the kitchen table beside my computer so I could look at the rest of it when I had time be

Pam and I went for a walk this morning on a trail we like. We were going to go to the gym but we figured we were running out of days where we could walk outside in the November sunshine. It's hard to maintain your surliness in the face of this: Of course, the picture doesn't show the fact that the unusual warmth of the day really ramped up the essence of cow shit, but that isn't surly-making so much as slightly gag-inducing. Still, it was a good walk. Then we went to the grocery store. The grocery store had Rold Gold Peppermint Dipped Snowflake Pretzels . Take that, surliness. Even the residual snark left over from when that woman had to pull into the parking spot right next to us so badly that she almost ran over Pam melted away, mostly.  Then we went to Shoppers Drug Mart because Angus wasn't happy with the blackhead scrub I bought him, and insisted that he needed daily pore cleanser, because yes, I'm at that stage now, and it's a BARREL of

Should blog. Don't feel like blogging. Anybody want to blog for me? I just spent half an hour noodling around on the internet trying to find the title and/or author of a book I read that I really liked, so I could check if the author had anything more recent. I realized, as I was googling, that all I can really remember is that the main character was an alcoholic female police detective. I can't remember what the mystery was or even what the setting was - Hawaii, maybe? So perhaps, in the event that I do remember which book it is, I should just reread that book instead of looking for a new one. In related news, I am not going to divest myself of the hundreds of books in my house and just keep a dozen or so, on the assumption that, by the time I work my way through all of them, I will have forgotten enough about the first one that it will then be new to me again. Matt is telling us about wandering around a park in Tokyo where they have designated spots in which you are allow

So clearly my sleep machine hasn't improved my memory yet. I just realized that I've been calling and emailing my husband thinking that he's still in Baltimore (where he was last week) and thinking it's weird when he doesn't get back to me right away (because after all it's in the same time zone). I realized five minutes ago that he's actually in Japan. When people ask me where he is and I can't immediately remember if it's, say, Tokyo or Shen Zen or Germany or Italy, I usually just say "who cares, he's equally useless to me in Ohio or Okinawa", but usually I'm at least on the right continent. Then I almost pulled one of these again, thinking I had to get my assignment done before I left to visit Zarah next Thursday and then realizing I was a whole week ahead of myself again and next Wednesday is the seventeenth, not the twenty-fourth. I'm thinking I might need to write a letter to myself every morning and put the date at the

1) A stand of sparkling silver birches behind a lower tier of red sumac on the side of the highway. 2) The flyers distributed by the kids for their nightly show in the attic: the "unvaling" of Eve and Charlotte's music video stylings, a news "brodcast", and a play about the Emperor of Japan and the Queen of England having tea together. 3) My Dad, slumped awkwardly on the futon in the attic before the show, saying "this isn't comfortable at all. I want a better seat next time". 4) My niece Charlotte in a top hat with her hair tied under her chin, being Abraham Lincoln. 5) Eve dressed in a magician's costume, trying to produce a rabbit from a hat but producing french fries instead, saying "I'm a little embarrassed now. For my next trick, I will make a little girl disappear" and running away. 6) My nephew Jonah sitting upright in a chair with a brown fuzzy blanket wrapped around him, fast asleep in front of the baseball gam