Lately I have been watching Jeopardy faithfully, because I am on a trivia team and it’s research, and totally not one step closer to embracing my future life in a nursing home.

Here’s something that bugs you when you watch Jeopardy all the time: people who say “please” every single time they ask for a category. “Civil War Battles for $400 please,” “Role In Common for $1600 please,” “European Bodies of Water for $1000 please.”

I realize this sounds curmudgeonly (one MORE step towards embracing the nursing home), but when you watch it all the time, it gets so annoying. You have the RIGHT to choose a category, players. TAKE IT.

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Also bothering me lately: recipes that say “salt to taste.” I am a science cooker. I cook a lot, and not by choice, not because I enjoy it or because I have some sixth sense about flavour or want express my creativity in the kitchen while salting-tasting-salting-tasting happily over a steaming pot for an hour. No, I want to follow the directions as quickly as possible and get that food on the table.

Would it be so hard to give me a general guideline to follow, say “1 tsp salt, or to taste” or “dash of salt, or to taste” or “1 Tbsp salt, or to taste.” I think we can all agree that these three salt amounts are very different, and I am not looking for guesswork. JUST TELL ME HOW MUCH SALT TO PUT IN. Thank you.

Today is the Captain’s 12th birthday. I rarely post on the girls’ birthdays, but the Captain’s birthday usually brings about a good wallow on the theme of They’re Not My Babies Anymore, eventually coming around to the personal growth moment of Perhaps That Is A Good Thing. This year: lather, rinse, repeat.

Working in my favour this year: no real signs of puberty yet, as he’s still safely below my shoulder in height and weighs less than most people’s pet dogs. I keep having to buy him bigger socks, and yet his shoes and boots seem to still fit, so possibly his feet are growing, but possibly not. Puberty! It’s such a mystery.

(Puberty, by the way, is his most hated word in the English language, giving him the willies like the word “moist” does to some people, and the word “lover” does to me, except when used ironically in a “Hello, lover” kind of way to refer to chocolate cake.)

Twelve seems like kind of a big number, though. By the time I was 13 I had a paying job. By the time I was 15, I was working all summer, and by the time I was 18 I had moved out to go to university. I feel like our lazy Summers of Awesome are limited, and that makes me sad.

Counteraction: make family memories! Now! As much as possible! CRAM IN THE MEMORIES.

So this year we are planning a Big Family Trip, something we have been saving for since we went to PEI. Our trip to PEI was awesome, we all had a fantastic time and were very sad to leave, but rather than go back we decided there was so much more of the world to see, and that we better get On It. We spent a lot of time out east talking about geography and oceans and tides and the different environments you’d see right here in Canada, and that led to a lot of talk about the Rocky Mountains, and THAT led to a lot of talk about how Sir Monkeypants has always wanted to go out west, so…

Calgary, Banff, and Jasper – Summer 2015. IT’S HAPPENING.

Happy birthday, Captain!

The other day we were riding in the car and the Little Miss asked me:

“Mommy, you know the things in our Easter basket? Do you leave them, or does the Easter Bunny?”

So I sighed – my last baby! – and I admitted that I do the leaving of treats.

Then she said, “Great. Can I have a stuffie then?”

Not fazed at all. Just happy to have a direct line to the supplier.

She appears to still totally believe that the Bunny brings the hidden eggs, though. I’ll be happy when all the “magical nighttime vistors” have been outed but it’s kind of sad, too, you know?

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A few days later, we heard an ad featuring Stephen Harper on the radio in the car, and that sparked this with the Little Miss – A Child’s First Talk About Politics.

Little Miss: Who is Stephen Harper?

Me: He’s the current Prime Minister of our country.

Her: I knew he was someone. Why is he on the radio?

Me: There is an election coming up, and he is telling us why we should vote for him.

Her: Doesn’t he just get to keep his job if he wants?

Me: No, we can pick someone else if we want.

Her: I think we should keep the old guy, IF he is not a bad guy, because you don’t know if the other guy is going to be a bad guy or not.

Me: Very true. But, they have to tell us before the election what they will do if they get picked.

Her: Oh, so you can pick a good guy.

Me: Yes. Sometimes they lie, though, so you have to decide who you are going to trust.

Her: Here’s how you can know. If they say “ummm…” and then take a long time to answer, they are probably lying. But if they answer right away, they are probably lying because they probably thought about what they would say. So if they take like, one minute to think, then they answer, that is probably the truth.

Me: I will keep that in mind.

Her: You also have to look at their face and body and stuff.

Alert Justin Trudeau: the Little Miss is available for pre-debate vetting if required.
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In other news, I had to renew the kids’ passports last month and seeing as how the Captain is now 11 (and actually, will be 12 TOMORROW, SNIFF), he had to sign his application. He can barely write in cursive and definitely has never signed his name to anything before, so we had him practice a few times before laying down his very first John Hancock, a sweet babyish scrawl of his name in all lower case. Aw.

Now he’s totally ready to sign autographs as a famous teen rock star. They grow up so fast!

My older two had their first visit to the orthodontist this week, at the recommendation of our dentist. I thought it was a bit early – the Captain will be 12 next week, and Gal Smiley is only 10 1/2 – but both had alarming-looking sideways teeth on their recent x-rays so we went for the consultation.

Here’s the conversation I had with a nervous Gal Smiley the night before:

Her: What’s going to happen there?

Me: Nothing scary. They will be just looking at your teeth and taking some measurements. At most, they might ask for new x-rays.

Her: Will they be pulling out my teeth?

Me: Definitely not. Even if that’s what he thinks is required, he won’t do that tomorrow. He will give us all the information and we will have time to think about what we want to do.

Her: Do I have to get braces?

Me: We don’t know, but if so, likely not for a while, because you are very young still and you have lots of baby teeth left. We will consider the options, and take our time thinking it over.

So, that was the plan, anyway. Actual events: we went, there were measurements and discussion and a lot of tut-tuts, and next thing you know I’m making an appointment two weeks out for her to have an appliance put in. GAH.

Lest you think the orthodonist is some sort of money-grabbing charlatan, I actually really liked him a lot, and he was very cool about the Captain, saying he just needs time for his mouth to get bigger and there’s no rush and his bite is fine for the moment, so let’s just let him grow a bit and we’ll see.

(Except for the fact that he does need one baby tooth pulled, because the molar above it is breaking loose out the side of his gum, which is SO HORRIFYING TO ME I cannot even type it without squirming, but our dentist can do the tooth pulling in 10 minutes some morning next week, although we may have to literally drag the Nervous Nelly Captain kicking and screaming into the chair to make it happen.)

But for Gal Smiley, her upper palate is smaller than the lower, and she is compensating for the mismatch by shifting her lower jaw to one side, resulting in a noticeable shift in her face that will cause weird jaw growth that is “easy” to fix now, but hard to fix later on, so yes, now it is. She has to have this device like a metal butterfly put into her upper mouth that we will expand with the turn of a key once a day for a month, then she has to keep it in for another six months to set the bone.

I’m trying to be Super! Upbeat! about the whole thing, and not just because I don’t want to seem like the Biggest Lying Mother That Ever Lied after promising her an ortho appointment with little ongoing impact. Also, I didn’t have braces and neither did Sir Monkeypants, so as far as we know, braces are just pretty little things that make your mouth pleasantly sparkly for a year or so. It COULD be true, right?

But the more I think about it, the more I worry – WILL it hurt? Will she drool a lot? Will she talk funny with it in? Will it stop her from eating her favourite foods? Will it stop her from eating altogether? Is it worth it?

Any advice would be welcome.

My March column for Capital Parent is up now over on their site, about our recent trip to an Ottawa 67s hockey game. See you over there!

I had another Tooth Fairy Fail on the weekend. Little Miss Sunshine lost her second tooth ever and we had the usual Comedy of Errors dealing with the fallout. How is it that I can be so uberorganized that I start my Christmas shopping in February, yet I cannot remember to be the freakin’ Tooth Fairy? Sigh.

Even if I had remembered, there was going to be a problem, because she insisted on putting it under her pillow. With the other two, we convinced them that the Tooth Fairy prefers the easy access of a bedside table. Gal Smiley has taken that even farther, and introduced this new thing, learned from a friend in her class, where you leave the tooth in a glass of water in the bathroom, then in the morning the water has been magically tinted to be the “colour” of your personal tooth fairy’s wings. I have to admit I was rather bitter about the whole adding on of even more traditions in association with this ridiculous process of buying your way into being able to throw away your child’s gross bloody tooth, instead of finding them gathered years later in a special tin like some sort of serial killer’s trophy box. But now I see the beauty, because a cup in the bathroom is a lot easier to deal with in a rush at 6:30 in the morning when you wake up and realize you have forgotten, AGAIN. Tip: keep your food colouring in the medicine cabinet.

So anyway, the Little Miss was all into the pillow thing and could not be dissuaded, and furthermore, she wanted to put JUST THE TOOTH under there, and I had visions of myself trying to slip my hand under her pillow without waking her while groping around for a tiny white speck the size of a few grains of sand, and it just seemed like it was unlikely to end successfully. Eventually I convinced her that the tooth might get lost, so she should put it in a tiny plastic box specifically for this purpose, given to her by our dentist.

So the tooth went under the pillow in the orange plastic box, and I went and watched some Jeopardy and then went to bed, merrily forgetting all about it. Then, as has happened about 17 times in the past, I happily snuggled in the warm covers for three minutes after the alarm went off before remembering, and then flew out of bed softly swearing under my breath about the TOOTH FAIRY DAMMIT.

She was already up and playing in her room but we guessed that she had possibly forgotten all about it, so Sir Monkeypants and I swung into Mission Impossible mode. He sent her to the bathroom, and while she was trapped on the potty he asked her through the door what had happened with her tooth and she said she’d forgotten to check. SCORE. So I ran downstairs and got a toonie, ran upstairs and put the money under her pillow, found the orange box, freaked out for a minute because I could not open the box, STUPID PLASTIC CLASPS, and then finally got it open and by some miracle the tooth did NOT go flying across the room, so I slipped the tooth into my robe pocket and fled the scene.

Five seconds later she came out and found her money was all amazed and ran to show us, and we were like, WOW, that’s so cool! How did she do it? AMAZING.

I’m thinking I’ll just give the older two a flat $20 and we’ll call it even for all tooth-related incidents going forward. Do you think it’s bad parenting to tell the youngest that the tooth fairy has died, and has bequeathed her the same lump sum? Not at all, right?

I am officially done with winter.

I feel like I have been a remarkably good sport about it this year, particularly as someone who has deeply and truly disliked winter in the past. I have been skiing, so I have been outside even when it’s minus 25, and it’s been okay. I have cheerfully shovelled side by side with my children. I have invested in many lovely new pairs of thermal socks and have enjoyed many cups of tea. I have remarked on how nice it is that it’s at least sunny out, that the days are slowly getting longer. I have loved watching the kids love the snow, rolling around in it like it was a bed full of money.

But now – I’m over it. A couple of days ago I woke up and looked outside and it was still winter, still frigid, still with the snow all over, and that was IT. DONE. Since then I have lost my powers of optimistic protection and have felt the wind drive itself right into my bones, felt my hands turn blue with cold. I have come to hate my snow pants and resent my giant clonky boots and gone barefoot in the house in defiance, only to find myself shivering with toes by the fireplace an hour later. It all sucks.

This morning Sir Monkeypants declared the Winter Of Our Discontent to be over, because the deep-deep freezing days were supposed to end with slightly milder temperatures – highs in the negative single digits – starting with today. But although he’s technically right, I still suffered a great suffering on my way to pick up the kids today, despite still suiting up in the full spacesuit of winter protection. IT DID NOT HELP.

Winter: you have finally broken me. I quit.

Last week I made little individual tourtieres for dinner. I love them, but it was a little depressing that something that took me over two hours to make was gobbled up in the 15 minute window between piano practice and running out the door for guides/scouts. Sigh.

I made an apple pie as well that night and a piece before bed and then another for breakfast the next morning did help soothe the hurt feelings, a little.

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Every morning I have oatmeal for breakfast, with maple syrup on it. Every morning I open the fridge to get out the maple syrup and see it in the fridge door, right there next to a big bottle of Bailey’s.

Some morning I may mix the two of them up and it may not be an accident.

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We have had a devil of a time getting the children to eat breakfast lately. I have thrown out all notion of healthy breakfasts and am now offering them cookies, pie, or even a half cup of tea for breakfast. It frustrates me that no one has yet invented a pill that could take the place of an entire meal, especially considering that such an invention would solve the world hunger crisis, not to mention freeing up all kinds of time for more productive activities, and allow travel to foreign destinations to be so much easier for the food-allergic among us.

Perhaps my children are just using this breakfast strike as a way to inspire me to invent such a thing. If so, the joke’s on them, as I intend to make it their homework for the next few years. HA.

Nicole over at the Boyhouse posted about 10 Childhood Books that Stuck, as in books that she read before age 12 that were especially memorable for some reason. I think it’s a meme that’s going around. Anyway, I was going to comment over there but it quickly ballooned into an out-of-control hijack of her blog so thought I’d move it over here.

So here are some books that come to mind when I think about those pre-grade-8 years:

1. The Forgotten Door by Alexander Key. We read this when I was in Grade 5, and I think it was the first fantasy book I’d ever read, and it blew my mind. Alexander Key is better known for his book Escape to Witch Mountain, and after reading The Forgotten Door I went on to read all his books, but this first one will always live in my memory – I can still quote parts of it. My class wrote him a letter as part of studying the book and it was my first author fan letter ever, and I gushed and gushed. Sadly, we heard back a few months later from his widow – he’d died just the year before – but it was still a wonder to me to have an actual response.

2. The Tattooed Potato, and Other Clues, by Ellen Raskin. I love, love, love Ellen Raskin. All her books are genius – they are mysteries, but odd and offbeat ones containing nutty characters and crazy situations and surprising twist answers to unusual questions. She’s best known for The Westing Game and I’ve read that book probably two dozen times and it’s great. But The Tattooed Potato holds a special place in my heart because a) the lead character’s name is a sassy girl called Dickory Dock and b) I never, ever saw the ending coming. Other titles by her include The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel), which I just read to my youngest and it totally holds up; and Figgs and Phantoms, a book that changed my whole world outlook when I was 12.

3. The Clue of the Tapping Heels by Carolyn Keene – My favourite Nancy Drew book, but in truth I read them all. ALL OF THEM. I also read all the Hardy Boys books – literally, ALL of them. Once when I was in Grade 4 I was home sick for a day, and my mother had an appointment that she had to go out for, so she gave me two brand new Nancy Drew books she’d been saving for my birthday to keep me busy in bed while she was out, and when she came back two hours later I had read them both. The Tapping Heels involves tap dancing and morse code – so yeah, loved that one.

4. Hurry Home Candy by Meindert deJong (pictures by Maurice Sendak). Checked this book out from the school library in Grade 5 at least four times – my younger sister FameThrowa discovered this fact when she was in Grade 5 at the same school, and saw my name multiple times on the card. Not sure why I did that, as this is seriously, SERIOUSLY, the saddest book of all time. It’s the story of a young stray dog, Candy, who goes through many adventures, most of which end badly or sadly or meanly. At the very, very end, the dog does find a kind home and it’s a WEEPFEST, I can’t even think about it now without welling up. FameThrowa bought me my very own copy about a decade ago and I can’t even imagine reading it to the children because I’d just sob all the way through it. It’s on the bookshelf downstairs if they want to have a go at it on their own.

5. The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald, Banner In The Sky by James Ramsay Ullman, and Crisis on Conshelf Ten by Monica Hughes. My mother has a brother, my uncle, and he’s 10 years younger than her, which makes him only 15 years older than me. When I was in middle school, he was a young adult but not married and he had to shop for his nieces for Christmas and had no idea what to get for tweenaged girls. So he went into a bookstore and asked the lady there what he should get for me, a 12 year old who loved reading, and she sold him these three titles, all of which changed my life. The Great Brain is a classic of hilarity – I read it to the Captain a couple of years ago and it totally holds up, funny as ever, just as I remembered it. Banner in the Sky is a story about a young man determined to climb a mountain and it was so moving and inspirational and I absolutely remember every word. And Crisis on Conshelf Ten – love, love, love that book, went on to read everything by Monica Hughes (she is best known for her Isis series, about a girl living alone on another planet). This one is about a society that lives on a future earth underwater, and one boy who is invited to use his low-grav skills to help settle the moon.

I just had a look on Amazon and let me say, it is sad that many of Monica Hughes’ books are now out of print – as are most of Ellen Raskin’s. I’m sure there’s more. In today’s ebook age, it seems like a simple thing to just upload the text and get it out there. Hm – possible new project.

Anyway, moving on!

6. Deenie by Judy Blume. Like every woman my age, I have read all of Judy’s books, but my favourites were Deenie and Tiger Eyes, both of which I read many times and heralded a new age of womanhood. Still remember Deenie making out with a boy at a party – THE SCANDAL. It was my own personal Fifty Shades of Grey. Also, I can still describe scene-for-scene how to get yourself a back brace for scoliosis. This book inspired me to seek out the movie Splendor in the Grass, starring Natalie Wood in the role that Deenie was named for, and that kick-started my whole love of classic movies, which soon became an all-consuming passion that lives on to this day.

As a fun aside, Nicole is doing a full chapter-by-chapter recap of Deenie over at her new blog, Throwback Three.

7. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I actually didn’t read a lot of “classic” literature as a kid. Things like Anne of Green Gables, Charlotte’s Web, or Little House on the Prairie were all read in my 20s because I felt I’d missed out on something. This is one of the few classic novels I did actually read, in Grade 5, and I loved it. Magical and dreamy with a kickass protagonist – oh, how I wanted my very own secret garden.

8. Among the Dolls by William Sleator. My whole life I thought this was another title by Frances Burnett, but it seems her book about dollhouses is a sweet little ditty about two competing dollhouses, while this one is a work of sheer TERROR. I had to look it up online but I’m pretty sure this is the one that continues to live large in my memory – probably the first horror book I ever read and it scared the pants off of me. It’s about a girl who gets a dollhouse for her birthday and, due to a troubled home life, is mean to the dolls inside – so then they suck her into the house so they can be mean right back. GAH. I also read The Green Futures of Tycho by the same author, about time travel, which mostly served to teach me who the hell Tycho Brahe was.

9. Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar, and Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. Both of these were read to my Grade 4 class by my totally awesome teacher (she later went on to become the school’s librarian), and I loved them, they were like a golden special treat for the end of the day. Years later I still absolutely remembered whole chucks of both wholesale, and bought both for my kids and insisted they read them, and now I have read both probably 20 times, at least. WORTH IT.

10. George and Martha by James Marshall. Not a lot of picture books on this list, because I was a precocious reader and was into novels at an early age. But George and Martha – oh, how I loved them. We owned their book about pea soup (Martha loves to make it; George hates to eat it, but can’t tell her because it will hurt her feelings), and I’m sure I read it 100 times. I saw their combined tales at the library last year and I checked it out for ME, not the children, and re-read it all and it was super nostalgic.

Ah, warm memories of days spent hiding in the corner of a family reunion with my nose in a book. Good times, good times.