Let me start this post by saying that I adore the library. The library is THE SHIZZLE. You know what you can do? You can go online and ask for any book or movie or magazine or ANYTHING, and then click it, then they’ll find it and transport it to the branch of your choosing. Then you can pop by and just pick it up. FOR FREE.

I know, right? Purely amazing.

And if you are my husband, and more tech savvy than I, you can even install some software on your phone, and ask for a book online, then it is delivered to your phone, then you can read it anywhere at any time, then you return it with the click of a button, all for free, and you never even have to leave the couch. AMAZING.

So! We can all agree, the library is great, right?

I have just one fairly minor quibble to discuss here. Last week we wanted to check out Green Eggs and Ham, because next week we are going to the NAC’s concert Green Eggs and Hamadeus, and our kids have (AHEM) actually never read the book, and we figured it would give some good context (and, as Sir Monkeypants wisely pointed out, save us from having to answer a thousand questions DURING the concert, GAH).

So I went online to their awesome system, and looked up Green Eggs and Ham, and it was actually on the shelves at my local branch, which is Hazeldean. I immediately requested a hold on the book, because I wasn’t going to be able to physically get there for a few days and thought this way, they would, you know, hold it for me. Using the hold system.

Now, in a situation like this, what do you think is going to happen? I was number one on the holds list, there were more than 25 copies available throughout the library system, and there was one copy currently on the shelf at the branch I was going to do the pickup at.

Wouldn’t you think that, upon receiving this request, a librarian would be dispatched to walk over to the shelf, pull the book, and put it on the hold shelf?

I sure did, but the answer is no, that is not at all what happened. What happened was that my request went into the system, and the system decided the best thing to do was to transfer a book from a different branch. I kept checking the website, and it would keep saying that Green Eggs and Ham was still on the shelf, currently available, at Hazeldean; meanwhile, my hold copy was “in transit.”

Today I happened to be going to the library and Green Eggs and Ham was not waiting for me on the hold shelf – it was still marked as “in transit” online. So I checked in the kids’ section, and it wasn’t on the shelf there, either. So I went to ask the librarian if perhaps they had pulled it for me, but it hadn’t made it out onto the hold shelf yet, but could I just pick it up since I was there. I explained the whole story about how I had seen online that it was on the shelf, then put it on hold, but yet days later it still wasn’t on the reserved shelf waiting for me.

Then, I got a very polite lecture on how if I see a book is on the shelf in the branch I want, I should NEVER put it on hold, because it’s a waste of resources for the librarian to have to go over and pull the book off the shelf, when I could have just come in and picked it up. And then, she looked it up in the system, and discovered they actually did have the book in the library – it was on the Early Readers shelf, not the Picture Books shelf where I had looked – so she walked over, found it, and pulled it for me.

Now, nothing against the librarian, who was really very polite, and clearly was just trying to highlight to me one of her pet peeves, which is people who use the online request system to request books that are already in their home branch. But I do wish to ask the following questions:

1. Do you use the online request system? If so, have you ever used it just to put a hold on a book, instead of requesting a transfer? Do you think it’s inappropriate to use the request system for holds?

2. Do you think it is a waste of library resources to ask a librarian to pull a book that is just sitting there on the shelf? I really wanted to point out that it was almost as much work for her to look up the book, then walk over and find it on the shelf, then pull it for me, since I couldn’t find it on the shelf myself, anyway.

3. Do you think (leading question here) that a bigger waste of library resources is that the online request system apparently does not give top priority, when filling a request, to books that are already in that branch, but instead decides that an inter-branch transfer is more appropriate? I would love to know what the algorithm is here – are they grabbing a copy to fulfill the request from the first branch that has one, alphabetically? Or perhaps the branch that has had it checked out most recently? You would think that “closest branch” – and nothing could be closer than the actual branch – would be most efficient, wouldn’t you?

Discuss.

Gal Smiley got her Scholastic order a few days ago. She’s always angling for the book that comes with a toy. She likes stuff that comes with a free action figure, or animal shaped eraser, or fancy pencil and pad set. For a long time I tried to resist, but although I still draw the line at things are pure toys or craft kits – there has to be SOME reading involved – I usually let her get the thing that comes with a thing (after she swears that she will TOTALLY read the book, and then NEVER reads the book, and I am a total idiot who, apparently, never learns, yet is capable of writing a run-on sentence like NO ONE’S BUSINESS).

So this time she ordered a Hardy Boys mystery book (which she would probably love, if only she would read the damn thing), and it came with a Voice Warper. It’s a little box that’s shaped and stickered up to look like an iPhone, which in and of itself makes it super cool. But there’s more! It can also record your voice – ten whole seconds worth – then play it back at one of four, count them FOUR, speeds.

This, as you can imagine has led to much hilarity – people greeted at the door with a chirpy chipmunk saying “hi daddy!” People woken in the morning with a booming, low voice warning, “GEEEEEEEEEEETTTTTTT UUUUUUUUUPPPPPP!” People having their laughter secretly recorded, then played back to them in the most embarrassing way possible! GAH.

I’d probably be annoyed by now except for one really mysterious thing, and that’s this: when Gal Smiley records her own voice, then plays it back at one speed slower, it sounds exactly like me. It’s freaking us both out. You would almost swear it was me speaking the words.

Every single time she tries this, we both look at each other in wonder and befuddlement and renewed amazement, like, HOW is this possible? I mean, I know we are related and all, but we never would have thought we sounded alike before. Physically speaking, we are different in almost every way. I am SHOCKED.

It’s almost like her voice from the future, calling back to us over some fancy time-travelling telephone. Weird, but cool.

So we continue to be both charmed by this, and a little squealy about it, but either way, I can’t get enough of listening to the thing. Scholastic, I owe you one.

(But seriously, Gal Smiley, READ THE BOOK ALREADY.)

Well, I’m sick. It’s just a head cold, but man, you would think no one had been sick ever in the history of the world, the way I am carrying on. This weekend I actually had to SIT DOWN, for like, HOURS, which is unheard of. GAH.

I think I have the same bug the kids had last week – remember last week, when I let the older two stay home from school then felt totally snowed by them? After that, I made all three of them march off to school every single day, where they coughed and sneezed all over their classmates. Now I’m in the same place they were four days ago, and I feel like total crap, and I feel like DOUBLE crap because I made them go to school feeling this way when all I want to do is lie around on the couch.

With a box of cookies, of course. I’m not DEAD, people.

So! I had big plans to write a really, really detailed account of the bitchy horror that Sick Lynn can be, but then I decided to check my reader before writing, and lo and behold, Meanie had already written the most perfect post ever about being sick.

So go read her post, and imagine me sniffling over your shoulder nodding, saying, “Yeah, what she said.”

Hey, I just found this in my drafts folder! I wrote it last week. But you can read it right now! Ah, technology.

Right now it’s minus 26 degrees Celcius outside, raw air temperature, and that my friends, is why I’m moving to Florida next week. Ha! I wish.

I am not a big fan of winter – I really feel the cold, and that gets worse each year, making me feel cold AND old. I am not an outdoorsy person by nature and add in snow, and ice, and wind, and cold, and yeah, my enjoyment of leaving the house is reduced to zero. Absolute zero. Ha! See what I did there?

To add to it all, I have a minor cold, picked up from the hooligans who shanghai-ed me into staying home on Monday, which means I have a slight fever and a sore throat. It’s enough to make you want to just curl up on the couch with a box of cookies, a bag of truffles, a cup of tea, a warm laptop, and a DVD of The Magnificent Seven, and of course, honey, I spent my morning working hard, don’t I always? You know it!

In honour of today’s Deep Freeze I thought I should list out all the things I actually do like about winter. Don’t worry, it’s a short list.

1. No bugs. That in itself is reason enough not to move to Florida.
2. The stuff you put in the compost bin freezes, so there’s no mouldy, liquid, smelly crap in the bottom of it each week to attract maggots.
3. I can pick up the kids from school in my jammies, because snowpants, a long coat, and boots make everyone else none the wiser, and of course, honey, I’m always dressed by school pickup time, aren’t I always? You know it!
4. I get to eat a lot of soup.

And…that’s all I got. Stay warm, Ottawans, stay warm.

I’m a stay-at-home-mom – actually, you know what, I’m going to just go hog wild here and refer to myself as a work-at-home-mom instead, because I do WORK, dammit – and that means I’m here all the time. Every day.

And THAT means that I’m much more likely than other moms, I presume, to allow my kids to have a sick day. I imagine working moms out there are laughing at the tiny, wee little potential health problems that have served as sick day excuses around here. “Oh, does baby-waby have a sniffle-wiffle? Then baby-waby is GOING TO SCHOOL ANYWAY, GROW A PAIR KID.”

Not around here, oh no! The smallest hint of a sore throat or fever of 37.4 is enough to warrant a day on the couch, while Mommy curls up beside you with her warm, warm laptop, occasionally interrupting the steady stream of movies and video games to encourage you to drink a little gingerale. Is baby-waby feeling any better-wetter?

I may sound a little bitter and jaded, but that’s only because both the Captain and Gal Smiley have been home all day. They both developed a cough overnight, which meant they didn’t sleep well, so they woke up with red eyes and slightly sore throats and the occasional polite heh-heh coming out of their mouths. The Captain, in particular, gets a little asthmatic when he gets a cold, so he immediately spikes a fever, which always makes him feel extra crappy.

So this morning we did the usual should-we-or-shouldn’t-we dance, where we try to determine exactly HOW sick they are, and if they are up for gym class or not, or if they are up for outdoor recess or not, or if they will infect anyone else, or what. In the end, we decided that the Captain’s cough and fever, combined with first period gym, meant he got to stay home; Gal Smiley suckered me into it when she lay her big sad head on the breakfast table and declared herself too tired to sit upright. Poor, sad, baby-wabies.

And of course, by mid-morning they were plenty able to a) scream and bounce around on the couch over some video game, b) fight over which movie they were going to get to watch, while asking me if they could each have a big bowl of chips while watching, like I may be a sucker but I’m not a TOTAL sucker, geez, and c) declare themselves too sick for lunch, but plenty healthy enough for cookies. All the while not showing any signs of fever, cough, or tiredness.

SUCKER.

Tomorrow, everyone is FREAKING GOING TO SCHOOL. And next time, you better be at death’s door, kiddos.

Back when my kids were babies – especially the Captain, as he was our first – we had a few grandparent/parent clashes. Nothing major, but you know the kind of thing I’m talking about – a grandparent has some advice, you chafe under that because you TOTALLY know what you’re doing, and there’s tension until you both figure out how the push-pull of caring for a kid you all adore will work out.

Back in those days I made a few internal resolutions through gritted teeth about how I will be as a grandparent. Things I would never, ever say! Things I would never, ever do! Boundaries I would respect! Selfless assistance I would give! Oh, I’d be the very model of a modern major grandmother, I would, yes siree.

Then yesterday, in the car, Gal Smiley was talking about her future kids. She is thinking these days of having one boy and one girl, and she will name them Delgado and Princessa, after two of the dogs in Beverly Hills Chihuahua, which my mother gave the kids for Christmas, which I have now seen approximately 50 times, and remind me to add “no dog DVDs!!” to my list of Rules of Awesome Grandmotherhood.

And right there, on the tip of my tongue, without even thinking, was this: “Ooooh…really? Don’t you think some other names would be nicer?”

And WHAM BAM, I have become every other grandmother, EVER.

Luckily I realized right at the last millisecond what was about to happen, and managed to swap out my gentle and helpful suggestion with a more awesome, “That sounds great, honey.”

Awesome Grandma says: Welcome, Delgado and Princessa. Internal Grandma says: SHIVER.

Guess the Awesome Grandma plan needs a little more work.

So. This happened. Not five minutes from my house, a suburban mother killed her two kids (aged the same as the Captain and the Little Miss), then herself. A stay-at-home mom who walked her kids to school and was head of the Neighbourhood Watch. Her kids would have gone to the same high school as my kids.

I didn’t write anything after Newton. It felt odd to act like nothing had happened, but I just did not have the first clue as to what to say. I couldn’t even process it, couldn’t fit something like that into the world that I know. Of course, we have to talk about it, we have to figure out how we can avoid something like that happening again, but on the other hand, I need to pretend it didn’t happen, need to lock it away in a small corner of my brain so that I could bring myself to send my kids to school again, and believe that they were going to be okay.

I didn’t even talk to my kids about it. I worried that they might hear something and have questions, but in the end I trusted that if they had concerns, they’d come to me. In the meantime, sitting down with them seemed to give the whole matter more weight than I wanted to give it, make it more real for everyone when I wanted it to just be a scary story someone told me once. I didn’t want to download my own fears onto them, to have them share the feeling that the everyday world had become a dangerous place. They shouldn’t have to feel that way. None of us should.

And now this. I sent them to school this morning again with nary a word. Will someone else say something at school? Will they come home with a secret fear that the next time I yell at them, I’m close to snapping?

That woman was like me in so many ways, yet she seems so far away, too. I’m grateful, so grateful, that I’ve never had to struggle with depression. I have fantastic support from friends, neighbours, sisters, and my husband, all of whom are willing to listen when I’ve had a crap day, willing to take the kids for a while so I can get a break. I have bad days and cranky days and screamy days, but I always have found the strength to set my sights on the next day, with a new resolve to make it a better one.

I am so, so lucky.

I really believe there’s nothing anyone could have done here. Something like this is so far outside the world as I know it, that it would never enter my head as a possibility. Even those close to this woman could never have thought for a second that this could happen. It’s the unthinkable. It’s impossible.

So I will tuck it away in that little locked corner of my brain.

But I will ask for help if I need it.

I will offer help to other moms in need.

I will take a deep breath and take a moment for myself in times of emotional stress.

I will find the strength to carry on.

I’m not a big one for New Year’s resolutions, in that I don’t ever make them just for the sake of making them. On the flip side, however, when I do make one, I tend to stick with it.

This year I am making the (ho-hum, yawn) stereotypical resolution to lose some weight. A few years back, when I stopped nursing the Little Miss, I was overweight and I worked really hard to lose 30+ pounds. Now I find the scale creeping up again – it’s nothing serious, but I’ve put back on enough that all the cute pants I bought to celebrate the weight loss are too tight, and the emergency one-size up pants I bought just to “tide me over” are now ALSO too tight, and that is…not good. So it’s back to watching what I eat and (GAG ME) exercising on occasion. Hopefully this horrible state of affairs doesn’t go on much longer, because people, I have PIE TO MAKE.

This might be the first year ever that I am actually making two resolutions, and the second is to find some focus in my life. I think this one has about an 80% chance of failure. Or maybe 85%. That’s because although I KNOW I need to stop trying to every single thing that catches my fancy, I still seem to think that I will magically produce five extra (energetic, alert) hours each day to get it all done. I want to design! and write! and bake! and teach! and parent full-time! and help friends! and exercise! and volunteer! and write a novel!

TOOOOOOOTALLY all going to happen, don’t you think?

Mostly I need to prioritize, so I’m not jumping from one thing to the next all the time, and to figure out which of these things really, really makes me happy and then try to pick just one. Or two. Maybe three, tops.

I get a whole year, right?

Remember back in December, when Sir Monkeypants had an awesome, dance-worthy gift for me, and Little Miss Sunshine almost passed out from the effort of keeping the secret?

She made it! I’m pretty proud of her.

On Christmas morning, I was very happily surprised to receive these:

And you’re thinking, pie plates? Don’t you already have pie plates? Answer: Yes, yes I do. Probably more than…everyone else on earth.

But although these may seem to be ordinary, mild-mannered, standard 9 inch Pyrex pie plates, they are actually (dramatic flourish please)…

EIGHT INCH PYREX PIE PLATES.

(9 inch big momma on the right, 8 inch beauties on the left).

Pyrex hasn’t made the 8 inch pie plate (the “208,” as it’s known in the biz) for more than 30 years. I didn’t even know they existed myself until I saw one at my mom’s about two years ago. She’d gotten it from my grandmother’s house when she passed away (and if you have one at home, I’m pretty sure you got yours from a similar place, right?).

Ever since then I’ve been on a quest, because I eat a lot of pie, and the smaller pie plates are a) cute and b) better sized for pies I am making for just me and Sir Monkeypants. But they are hard to come by. They turn up on eBay every now and again, but usually chipped or worn, and the shipping is insane. For a while I was very committed to checking vintage stores in the area but I never saw any and eventually gave up.

But now I have TWO. In perfect, perfect condition. BEAUTIES, I tell you.

Let the pie making begin.

The other day the Captain asked me to open a bottle of juice for him, and I got all up with my Godfather voice, saying, “I do you this favour, and someday, and that day may never come, I may ask you for a favour in return…” You know the drill.

When I was a kid, my actual godfather (shout out, Uncle George!) used to talk to me every single time he saw me in the classic Godfather growl. He’d say, “Kid, I am your godfather. Someday, and that day may never come, if you need a favour, you come to me…” And so on. Being like, 8 years old, I had no idea what the heck he was talking about, but that didn’t stop me from doing my own Marlon Brando impersonation around the house.

So I considered myself something of a Godfather specialist, and after I pulled it on the Captain, it led to a conversation about the movie (in the most stripped, cleansed version, we’re not trying to terrify the kid, geez). And I explained about the favour quote, and the voice, and who the godfather is (without actually using the words “mob” or “mafia,” try that at home kids!).

My point here is that I went to YouTube to find the clip in question with this quote, and I found it easily, and it turns out THE WORD “FAVOUR” IS NOT EVEN USED.

NOT AT ALL.

My mind is BLOWN. Did you all know this is a famous misquote? What he actually says is, “Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this justice as a gift on my daughter’s wedding day.”

A SERVICE? A SERVICE?

Mind boggling. My Marlon Brando may never be the same.