Last night at around 9 pm my mom called.

(Hey! I just realised I didn’t even tell her about the Captain’s report card! Doh!)

Anyway, she was working on a math problem with Red, my 14-year-old niece. Here’s what they do in grade 9 math these days.

There’s a drawing of a hexagon with a circle at each veritice, and another circle at the midpoint of each edge, like so:

            a  b  c
          l         d
        k             e
          j         f 
            i  h  g 

Arrange the first 12 counting numbers in the 12 circles so that the sum of the three numbers of each of the six sides is the same. The three circles connected by the triangle connecting the three vertices (a-e-i) also give the same sum.

My mom was calling to find out if “the first 12 counting numbers” meant the numbers 0-11, or the numbers 1-12. It’s a term I am not familiar with at all. I guessed it meant 1-12, because if you ask the Captain to do some counting, he starts at 1, not 0. Turns out, though, [SPOILER!] the answer is to use the numbers 0-11.

and I are always into doing a little math in our free time, so we set up a bunch of algebraic equations and went about solving them. But you know what? There doesn’t seem to be any way to actually solve the problem.

The best we could do is find boundaries on S, where S is the sum of each of the sides (and the triangle in the middle). We could set a minimum value of S (14) and a maximum value of S (19), and as it turns out, you can make the hexagon alone work with any number in that set (i.e. you can make a hexagon where the sum of each side is 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 or 19). And in fact, for most of those possible sums there are multiple solutions for the placement of the numbers around the hexagon. But we believe that the triangle-sum limitation means that only one solution is actually possible…but we could not solve it using algebra.

In the end we had to look it up on the internet and found this page that talks about finding the range of possible values for S. By fluke the chosen example they had for the hexagon shape is the solution that Red needs. But even this page, which uses equations and approaches the problem mathematically, can only get so far before it’s just guesswork.

was up until midnight working on this, only to give up in frustration. He says that they may as well have sent Red home with a Sudoku, for all the math she is actually learning by working on this problem. Certainly the algebraic approaches we used to even limit the value of S were, we believe, way beyond what they do in Grade 9 math, so probably she was expected to figure this out purely through trial and error. Surely there are better things to be teaching in math these days!

Yesterday Captain Jelly Belly brought home his mid-term report card. He scored excellents in all categories, but before we get too excited, remember that this is JK, where most of the categories have to do with behaving and following rules and using the toilet independently. You may remember the Captain? The one whose future job will somehow involve the enforcing of many many rules, such as lawyer or Chief of Police or maybe drill seargeant? The one who makes a citizens arrest whenever I step off of the front door tile area in my boots? He was born to exceed in JK.

Despite the fact that JK is not exactly rocket science, though, I totally had to fight the impulse to call my mom, my sisters, my cousins, everyone in my rolodex just to announce just how well he’d done on his little report card. He’s brilliant! A genius! I’m so freakin’ proud!

But I held back, and you know why? It’s because I remember that when I was in school, the exact same thing used to happen to me. There’s no doubt that the Captain is my son, because I am also known as Major-General Rule Follower First Class, and thus, I usually did well in school and brought home good reports. Every time, my mom would run to the phone to call my Nana, my aunts, all her friends, and the newspaper boy to share the news.

And I totally died with embarrassment.

Part of the reason for my shame was the usual lack of self-esteem faced by 14-year-old girls that still have not hit puberty. I just didn’t feel like I had any bragging rights, I didn’t want any attention; I preferred to stand very still along flowered walls and hope no one noticed me.

But mostly, I felt kind of bad and sad for my mom, that she had to use my accomplishment just to have something to brag about. That she told everyone the news like it was her news to tell, like she had done something special, when really, I had done all the work. I thought all the other people she was calling would see through her ruse immediately, and be all like, “Oh, poor TurtleHead’s mom, she has nothing of her own to talk about so she has to go and boast about her daughter.”

Now that I am a mom, I can see how far I was from the truth. I know the swell of pride that comes from seeing your kid succeed in the world. I know the feeling of joy when someone else sees how special and smart your kid is. I know that it’s just such a relief that you don’t have anything new to worry about, and you want to share that relief and joy and pride with other people who care about your kid who maybe were worried, too. I love my kid, and so does my mom, and so do all his aunts, and I know they’d all love to see his report card. It’s so cute!

It’s so funny how my view of this situation has totally changed. I remember the kid side of things, but now I feel the parent side of things. Really makes me want to call up my mom and apologize for all the times I cringed at her phone calls like a totally unappreciative idiot. (And also to mention how the Captain did on his report card.)

Thank goodness for blogging. Now I can tell everyone and he doesn’t even have to know!

Sir Monkeypants has poker tonight. I always get a little excited when he’s going out for the evening because I envision myself with hours and hours of free time, quiet time, time to do whatever me-stuff I’ve been putting off.

In reality though, after all the kids are in bed and I’ve cleaned up the dinner dishes and answered my e-mail, I only have about an hour to fill up before bedtime. I usually book in about 100 hours of activities, so as you can see, I do set myself up for disappointment.

Here’s what I would love to do this evening (in descending order of their likelihood of actually happening):

1. watch the final two episodes of Pushing Daisies that I haven’t seen yet
2. watch any/all of the dozen episodes of Jon And Kate Plus 8 I have stored up on the PVR
3. finish off a few half-written blog posts
4. port the kids’ baby books over from the old computer and update them
5. sort and label the photos we took over Easter weekend; select the best ones for printing and make a FuturePhoto order
6. take a long, hot bubble bath
7. flip through a six-month backlog of magazines so they can be recycled/returned/removed from my desk
8. watch my DVD of Serenity with the commentary turned on
9. watch my DVD of Ocean’s Eleven with the commentary turned on
10. try out our new elliptical trainer

Ah, who am I kidding. I’ll probably have a big bowl of ice cream and fall asleep while watching Don’t Forget The Lyrics. Always a party at TurtleHead’s house!

Lately I’ve been making a lot of noise at home about moving my blog off of LiveJournal. My big beef is that people who read this blog who are not members of LJ have a hard time leaving comments. On other blog sites, I can comment any time I want to and leave my name and URL so the writer knows who I am. On LJ, I have to leave my blog open to completely anonymous comments, which either results in jackasses leaving stuff that they know is untraceable, or people I know having to sign their post at the bottom in a lame-o fashion that makes them seem like internet amateurs. Blech.

On the other hand, I love that I’ve been able to make new friends and discover many new blogs via friends-of-friends. I like my friends page and I check it compulsively. And I also like the fact that I can make friends-only posts, although I don’t do that very often.

So I’m torn.

I just found out that LJ now supports OpenID. When commenting, people who have blogs on other sites can now enter their URL, and somehow it automatically will label their comment with their identity. Yay! I notice that Blogger is supporting it too.

Anyone out there with a non-LJ URL want to try it out on this post?

Gal Smiley is upstairs right now watching the Berenstain Bears on Treehouse. Here’s a sampling of their theme song, as sung by Tanya Tucker:

Somewhere deep in bear country
Lives the Berenstain Bear family
They’re kinda furry around the torso
They’re a lot like people, only more so

Hm. So they are “more so” than people? What does that mean? An animated family of bears is actually more human than humans? Sounds like someone has been spending too much time working on their sociology thesis.

Even weirder is that “more so” is added to rhyme with “torso,” which is hardly a word that your average three-year-old uses in everyday conversation. I could maybe give them “more so” if they were forcing a rhyme with a word that makes sense, but torso? I think it would have been easier to write a song using the word “anthropomorphic.”

In fact, I suggest a change to the following:

Somewhere deep in bear country
Lives the Berenstain Bear family
Although they’re bears, they’re anthropomorphic
To appeal to a three-year-old demographic

See, not too hard, no?

Last summer I posted Little Miss Sunshine’s birth story, and a few weeks ago, I wrote up my experience with Captain Jelly Belly. So I thought I’d go back and read what I wrote when Gal Smiley was born, because I’d had my blog for a few months back then, and surely I had written some sort of announcement or summary of the day. And you know what? I didn’t even mention it. Oh yeah, had a baby, no big deal, no big changes, nothing of note to record! You can tell I wasn’t too into this whole “blogging” thingy back then.

So just for completeness, I thought I’d type it up.

Three-and-a-half years ago, I was sitting on the couch watching TV while Sir Monkeypants did a little work on his laptop in the kitchen. The Captain was already in bed, asleep. It was my due date. I’d had an OB appointment that morning showing no dilation or activity, and my OB had booked an ultrasound for later that week, but I was pretty convinced I’d be having the baby today and told him I’d see him at the hospital the next morning, when he came on for his shift at 8am.

Sound familiar? Like, exactly the same scenario as with the Captain?

6:30 pm — Nothing is going on. What the hell? This is when I felt my first contraction with the Captain! Get this show on the road!

7 pm — Still nothing. Could I possibly be…mistaken? No!

7:30 pm — Hold the phone.

8 pm — A second contraction! TOLD YOU SO. My will, she is like iron. I alert Sir Monkeypants that labour has begun. He gets out the stopwatch. Contractions are coming every 10 minutes or so.

8:45 pm — Sir Monkeypants calls over to RheostaticsFan to let her know that we will probably need her to come over to care for the Captain sometime in the middle of the night. She decides that it would just be easier for her to come over now, so she can sleep at our place and not have to wake up and drive over at 3 in the morning. Plus, that way, we can leave whenever we feel ready. So she goes off to pack an overnight bag and says she’ll be over soon.

9:30 pm — Contractions have been coming on strong, every few minutes, for at least a half hour now. But my labour with the Captain lasted 14 hours. It’s way too early to go to the hospital, right?

9:45 pm — RheostaticsFan arrives. Boy, am I happy to see her! We make chit chat, with me pausing every five minutes or so to climb up the couch and moan in pain. It’s quite the party. We should have put out snacks. As with the Captain, we begin The Talk — should we go to the hospital now? Will we be embarrassed to be told that we need to go back home for the next 10-12 hours? On the other hand, if we don’t go soon, will Sir Monkeypants be delivering the baby? Ha ha! That totally won’t happen! Right?

10 pm — Sir Monkeypants calls it. We’re going now. I think he maybe called our moms. I was kinda too busy to notice.

10:30 pm — We’re in the triage room, which is the room where they receive pregnant ladies who think they are in labour. A nurse checks you out and decides if you should go home or be admitted. The nurse says I’m at 3-4 cm dilated and having good contractions, so yay! we’re here to stay. I immediately ask for my epidural. Bring on the drugs! The nurse goes off to find the epidural guy and a birthing room for us.

11 pm — The nurse finally returns, only to tell us that we can’t have a birthing room yet — there is one available, but it needs to be cleaned and they can’t seem to find any of the custodial staff. The worse news — I can’t have an epidural until we are in the birthing room, and the epidural guy is about to go into the operating room for back-to-back C-sections. Since it’s unlikely we’ll be in our room in the next two minutes, I probably can’t have my epidural for at least another hour. I pout. Don’t upset the pregnant lady!

11:30 pm — We’re finally in our birthing room, and as expected, epidural guy is busy. The nurse checks me and I’m 5-6 cm dilated, and whining like a big baby (no pun intended!). I still haven’t met the OB on duty, and she’s busy in the aforementioned C-sections, so the nurse goes down the hall to another birthing room where there is a midwife attending to her private client. “Just in case,” the nurse says.

11:45 pm — The midwife, Anne-Marie, drops by to say hi and to check me out. I’m 7-8 cm dilated and begging for an epidural. The nurse says, “Oh, it’ll be soon dear,” while she and Sir Monkeypants exchange looks that say, “We’re way past that now, but you be the one to tell her.” Don’t think I didn’t see you. In the meantime, the nurse offers me some gas, and I say, “YES, GOD, YES.” The gas is gooooood.

11:55 pm — Nurse: “Let me know if you feel like you need to push.”

11:56 pm — Me: “I WILL BE PUSHING NOW.” Nurse: “Ahh! No, don’t push!” Me: “AS IF.”

11:57 pm — The nurse tells me to hang on, and it’s a huge, huge thing that she asks. I can’t describe the overwhelming need to push that comes when the time is right. You just gotta do it, you know? But I wait as best I can as she calls over to the operating room, only to find that the OB is still busy with the C-sections. So she races down the hall to get Anne-Marie. At this point I seriously thought that Sir Monkeypants would be delivering the baby within the next minute. Except for the minor complication that he’d have to do the delivery with one hand, because I was using his other hand to pound over and over into my forehead, to distract me from the whole birth situation. Surprisingly effective, I recommend it.

12:05 am — Anne-Marie arrives and is totally rocking awesome. She calmly assesses the situation and gets everyone into position. She gets me to relax by telling me softly but firmly what is going to happen and what I need to do. I thank her by having my water break all over her shoes. Now that’s gratitude!

12:15 am — Everyone ready. One push, head out. Second push, all done.

12:21 am, September 21st — Gal Smiley is born. I made it, and I feel awesome! The nurse cleans her off and wraps her in a blanket while Anne-Marie delivers the placenta, which doesn’t really hurt at all. I get to hold Gal Smiley and nurse her right away. With just us, the midwife, and the one nurse in the room it all feels really intimate and lovely and right.

12:30 am — The OB on call, Dr. Honey, arrives. Nice to meet you! Anne-Marie scoots back to her actual client. Sorry other lady! Hope you didn’t deliver your baby while your midwife was busy delivering mine! I need one stitch for a small tear, which Dr. Honey repairs while gets a chance to hold the baby.

1 am — We’re wheeled off to our recovery room, me holding Gal Smiley. On the way Anne-Marie pops out of her client’s room just to say hi and see how I’m feeling. She’s so fantastically nice, I’d cry with gratitude if I weren’t so busy beaming with joy. I’m really happy I got this chance to thank her profusely for all she did.

2 am — Gal Smiley and I are doing great, so Sir Monkeypants heads home to relieve RheostaticsFan. It’s funny, we were so very worried about what we would do with the Captain when the time came to go to the hospital, that RheostaticsFan did her best to make us feel better by coming over for several Saturday afternoons before the birth to get to know the Captain’s schedule and make him comfortable with her. And in the end, he didn’t even know that she’d been there!

I stayed in the hospital for just over 24 hours, and then we were discharged and back at home. I can’t get over how great I felt after this birth — especially compared to the Captain’s delivery, where many, many stitches from the episiotomy and a big drop in blood pressure after the epidural left me bloated, nauseous, and unable to sit or walk comfortably for weeks. With Gal Smiley, I was up and out of bed within a few hours, and able to walk around the block with both kids within a week.

I’m not convinced that I could have gotten through the Captain’s delivery without an epidural, but I do believe it would have been a faster delivery, with less damage and an easier recovery, without one. As it is, I’m thankful I got a chance to deliver Gal Smiley this way — with minimal medical intervention and drugs. I’m a firm supporter of epidurals — by all means, have one if you need one! — but the delivery of Gal Smiley just felt really natural and powerful and joyous. I recommend it.

Well, we’re back. I won’t go into much detail about the trip except to say this: we appear to have lived through it.

Although, sometimes appearances can be deceiving.

About a million years ago, during the drive down, when we were still all chipper and optimistic and relatively well rested, we did have one real stroke of luck at the McDonalds in Kingston. We stopped there for lunch, and ordered food while I took the kids to the bathroom. Just as we sat down to eat, the place lost all power. Everyone else who was there was out of luck. The power was down for about half an hour, and when it came back up, the family next to us rushed over to order, only to find out that they needed an additional 15 minutes or so to get back up to grilling temperature. They were on the road to Toronto as well, so they decided to just leave without eating.

I just could not imagine the horror that would have happened if we had told the kids we were stopping at The Ronald McDonald, as the Captain calls it, pulled right up into the parking lot and gotten everyone out of their seats and inside, only to have to break the news that there were NO CHICKEN NUGGETS. We may as well have told them that SANTA IS DEAD. I have no idea how we would have gotten them back in the car. The Captain would have been absolutely hysterical while Gal Smiley would have gone catatonic and limp.

So, we were very, very lucky.

Whenever you hear of someone winning the lottery, they always say, “Oh my goodness, I never win anything.” Which only makes sense, because if you were someone who always won something, I imagine you’d be playing the lottery as your main profession, and we’d see your name in the news a little more often. But aside from that, I’ve been thinking lately about how people usually remember the times they’ve been unlucky, and forget about the little lucky times. So I’ll try to record a few of them here, to help me through the long, dark days when they find traces of peanuts in the Cadbury Easter Eggs and must recall them from all Ontario locations, before I’ve had a chance to buy seven or eight giant bags at the post-Easter sale — I can’t even type that without a tear falling from my eye.

For the record then: McDonalds incident, lucky.

Rest of weekend: we appear to have survived.

We’re all packed up and ready to go. We’re just waiting for the Wee One to wake up, then we’ll grab the Captain from school and be on the road. With a giant coffee in hand. Whoo hoo!

In the meantime I’m doing a little last-minute surfing and I found this picture online (via Suburban Bliss) and I SO SO love it. If you feel the overwhelming need to buy me presents, then look no further!

Also here is a great link to a Maclean’s column about how much winter is screwing us over. Courtesy of Dooce, the fifth most influential blog in the world (TurtleHead currently coming in around the 5 million mark).

This is probably the last post I’ll be able to make for a week or so. We’re off tomorrow to visit The Grandparents in southern Ontario, and I’ll be without the internet. Without the internet! I can hardly type it without tearing up. How will I survive, if I can’t read 20 blogs a day?

I love going to visit my mom — I’ve said it here before, it’s the closest thing to a real vacation I can get. My mom and my older sister do all the meal planning and cooking. My older sister’s teenaged kids adore the Captain and Gal Smiley and take them to the park and for bike rides and downstairs to play video games. All the adults want to hold and play with the Wee One. So all in all, it’s two days when I hardly see a kid and hardly have any housework to do. It’s not unusual for me to actually find myself sitting on the couch with nothing to do.

That said, I am really, really not looking forward to the eight hour drive. It usually goes well for the first four hours or so, then there’s two hours of fussiness, then two hours of total mayhem and wailing. This time I’ve packed little art boxes for the older two kids — lunchpails with self-sharpening pencil crayons, coloured paper, stickers, and little colouring books. They also have a few little cars and some plastic animals in there. I’m really hoping that this stuff is the equivalent of eight hours of fun. It is, right? RIGHT?

We’ll be driving back on Monday, so I’ll try to stop in and say hi on Tuesday, in between about a million loads of laundry. There better be a big bowl of ice cream waiting for me when we get home!

Remember a few months back, when I was all freaked out about the Bisphenol-A that leaches from plastics? And my sister calmed me down to a point where I could at least pretend to function around the kitchen like a normal person?

Recently I read that the self-same chemical leaches from white plastic piping, the kind that cheap-o builders use these days in mass-market housing instead of quality copper piping, to save a few bucks. And guess who’s house is chock full of white plastic piping? Yup. Ours.

Apparently the leaching is worse when hot water is run through the pipes. Like say, when you are giving your kids a bath. Or getting some hot water to wash the dishes you will later use to prepare food for your family. Sometimes I feel like that mom in Erin Brockovich, the one who learned that it was their drinking water giving their kids cancer, then freaked out and ran outside to stop her young daughters from frolicking in their swimming pool.

Then some friends of ours told us that the amount of fluoride in our drinking water is too much for small children, and it basically amounts to an overdose situation for kids under 4. And know what? It’s apparently true.

And about a week ago, I heard a story on the CBC about phthalates, which are some crazy chemical that is often found in perfumes and scents, only you don’t know about them because manufacturers of soaps and shampoos are only required to list “parfum” on the label, not the actual chemical makeup of said scent. Apparently, this chemical acts like estrogen in the body, and when they tested babies who had been bathed with baby soaps, they had an elevated level in their bloodstream. As in, absorbed through their skin. Know how many baby-marketed soaps you can buy at our drugstore that do not contain “parfum”? Zero.

You know what? That’s it. I think I have hit my limit of worry.

There’s only so much of this kind of stuff I can take. I already have enough to worry about. I have to fret about whether or not they are eating enough or sleeping enough. I have to make sure they grow up to be nice people and get read to enough and feel loved and safe in their own home. I have to worry about kidnappings and other people being mean to them and not having enough money to pay for them all to go to university. I have to worry about drunk drivers and sledding accidents and whether everyone has had a poop today.

I don’t have any worry parts left over to feel scared to give my kids a glass of water, or to give them a bath. It’s too much!

I’m not saying that I’m going to just stick my head in the sand and ignore anything that may be a health threat. I’m sure these concerns are very real and the public has a right and a need to know. But I can’t keep living in constant fear of everything in our house. I can’t overthink my decisions to brush their teeth or let them have their juice in their favourite Buzz Lightyear plastic cup. I’ll never make it through the day. I just have to accept that there are weird chemicals around us and we don’t know what kind of risks are there and then just live with that. Otherwise my head will explode.

We live in a country where we have access to almost-unlimited clean, fresh water, with more than enough food of all varieties at the grocery store. We don’t have people shooting in the streets or planting car bombs outside schools, we have good health care and good schooling and public transit and malls. I think it’s a shame that we can live in one of the safest, nicest places in the world and still have to fear like bad things for us and our children lie in every nook and cranny. I have a need now to focus on the positive, good things for a little while and let these other worries go.

Maybe someday they’ll figure everything out and this Bisphenol-A and phthalates and whatever will turn out to be as bad an idea as lead in gasoline and asbestos siding. Maybe it’ll turn out to be nothing. Until we know for sure, I just have to stop overreacting to every single news story. I have to stop worrying about these things for my own sanity.

If there’s something concrete I can do, let me know. Sure, I’ll stop putting plastic dishes in the microwave. I’ll supervise teeth brushing and limit the amount of toothpaste. Beyond that, please stop with the fear-mongering and just let me get by with the usual amount of fretting.

(Although I am thinking about getting a quote to have our plumbing replaced. Just in case.)