Despite my grumpy resistance – actually, I think it’s fear of the rug being yanked out from under me, once again – it seems that Spring is slowly making its way to Ottawa. I can tell because the kids left this morning wearing a wildly divergent variety of outerwear: light jacket with snow pants for Gal Smiley, full snowsuit with rain boots for the Little Miss, winter coat and boots but no snowpants for the Captain. It’s the time of year when the mud room spews a thousand levels of warmth and wetness protection into the whole house.

Yesterday I picked up the kids from school in my usual massive parka and Frankenboots, but it was sunny and calm and there was that smell in the air, and the kids were all running around with open jackets and hair whipping around behind them (even the Captain, who has grown out his hair past the point of The Beatles and into the realm of Iggy Pop). And although I tried to give them all dire warnings that this Spring was fleeting, that snow would surely come again, they were happy and I smiled in spite of myself.

So today I broke out the cute ankle boots, and my still-a-winter-coat-but-shorter-and-sassier jacket, and hummed a little Adele as I shopped for Easter candy at the grocery store. I took the school-pickup sled out of the back of the van and stowed it away in the garage and I bought some sidewalk chalk at the store and even I had to admit, it seems Spring has Sprung.

I’ve been putting off writing this post because it’s the 1400. WordPress does this thing now where they tell you, every time you post, how many posts you’ve made. This one is number 1400 and that seems big and momentous and I felt like I should write something Important To Mark The Occasion, but I couldn’t think of what. I thought maybe I should do some sort of celebratory giveaway, but everything I thought of seemed lame, or else so nice I would want to keep it for myself, which kind of defeats the purpose. So I was stalled.

As it turned out, all I really wanted to do was write about how Spring is peeking its head up, and it’s about time, and although I tried to fight it, everything really does seem fresh and new and exciting and hopeful again. Even 1400 feels like a new beginning.

The Captain was home sick on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday this week, and yesterday after three days of having him at home I had a kind of weird meltdown. I wasn’t screamy or angry or even too bitchy; instead I just got kind of withdrawn. I gave up trying to fight with the kids to do homework and just let them run wild in the house while I lay on the couch, dozing in and out a bit, and generally feeling glum.

I thought maybe I was getting sick, but the Captain is back at school today and I’m frolicking around the house like a newborn fawn in Spring.

(Aside: we recently got Bambi from the library as our Family Movie Night film, and I had NO IDEA it was so wonderful. I’d been living in fear of the mother’s-death scene, but it is tastefully done and my kids were well prepared, so it did not overshadow the film at all. Instead, we were all incredibly charmed by the story and the characters and the nature preservation message. Totally still relevant and fresh today. Recommended!)

Anyway, I realized this morning that the problem is that I had been around people too much, for too long. Over March Break I had the kids full time, and also we had several visitors in and out, and by Monday morning I was ready for a little me-time. Having the Captain at home sick was actually very little work – he read quietly on the couch or played video games, only occasionally asking for a drink – but just having someone else in the house was short-circuiting my brain. I couldn’t get a lick of work done – I’d sit at the computer and just stare at it, unable to organize my thoughts or put anything coherent together.

Usually having a kid home doesn’t bother me like this, I can even get work done with the Little Miss playing by herself or colouring at the table in the afternoons. I guess it was the accumulation of March Break plus three more days of the Captain’s constant company that just overloaded the system.

I think being a stay-at-home-mom, now that the Little Miss is gone for a couple of hours each day, is amplifying my introvert tendencies. I’m not really complaining – I love my alone time! – but it’s interesting and helpful just to be aware of these sorts of things about oneself. As it is, I’m like a coffee addict that went through withdrawal, and now has been reunited with her beloved Joe. In fact, I think I’ll make myself a cup right now and curl up with a little work, and a joyful look on my face. Just me.

Captain Jelly Belly turned 10 years old this week, the big 1-0, a whole decade, double digits. I tried really hard to get myself all worked up about it – my baby! getting big! getting old! – but I was strangely sanguine about it all. He is who he is, and I really, really like him just the way he is now, which I guess was the beginning and the end of it. Ten is pretty good, actually.

Especially when held in relief to my four-month-old nephew, who has been visiting this week, along with his three-year-old brother, and oh boy, am I ever out of practice at:
a) holding the dead weight of a sleeping baby while making dinner with the other hand;
b) engaging in an philosophical battle with a three-year-old about why he has to wear socks to go outside;
c) dealing with two crying children at the same time, and
d) just about everything else associated with babies and toddlers and preschoolers, EVER.

So yes, 10, with its ability to dress itself and feed itself and every carry the groceries for me on occasion, when guilted into it, is pretty good.

Instead, I find myself reflecting more on the changes in myself in the past decade. Sure, the Captain was a wee squawking baby a decade ago. But wasn’t I, as well? I was green. I was young. I had a head full of non-grey hairs and a face that was relatively wrinkle-free.

Everything seemed so dire back then. Every baby cry, the end of the world. Every poop, the biggest ever. Every trip, the most epic journey ever undertaken. Now I’m so much more casual about things – even the visiting baby and preschooler are no trouble, we just mop it up, nap it up, kiss it up, and it’s back to business as usual. TCB, baby, TCB.

I’ve learned so much about how to feed a family, how to comfort another person, how to share, how to grow. I’ve learned about my own strengths and weaknesses, I’ve learned what I’ll stand for, and what is off the table. I’ve learned the exact point where my patience ends and the exact reasons I’ll break into laughter.

I’ve figured out who I am and what I want, and you know what? It’s this, right here, right now.

That’s a pretty good decade, I figure.

Did you know that The Amazing Race is coming to Canada?

I have a love/hate relationship with the show. We watched it quite faithfully for a few seasons but then started to really mind the bickering. Then we got back into it for a while when the kids showed some interest – we thought we could watch it as a family – but again, the bickering was kind of a turn-off. I certainly don’t mind the drama of teams that are lost, or blowing a challenge, or exhausted, or having a meltdown.

(LORD KNOWS that would be me every single second. I have often thought it would be HILARIOUS to go on the show myself, because I hate travelling SO MUCH, SO VERY VERY MUCH, and it would be sure to be an absolute gas for everyone watching.)

What I do mind, however, is teams that were selected because their relationship is already pretty dysfunctional, and so don’t know how to be nice to each other under otherwise good circumstances. That’s not cool, dudes, not cool at all. I’m sure you know of whom I speak.

(On the flip side: most favourite team ever, The Cowboys. Close runner-up: The Harlem Globetrotters. Which is why – shhhhhhhhh – have purchased super secret tickets to see the Globetrotters next month at Scotiabank Place, will be surprising Gal Smiley and the Captain, because that’s the one season they watched of The Amazing Race before the meanness on the show led to the meanness of Parental Censorship. It’s going to be epic. EPIC LIKE A CHEETAH.)

Anyway! My point here is that the show is going to be having a Canadian edition this spring, which means a) travel around my own country, which I am really, really interested in, because even a terrible traveller like myself can probably handle going to a place where they have the same food and speak the same language and the light switches work the same goddamn way, and b) people being really nice to each other, because hello, Canadian. Am I right?

Adding to the excitement around here is that two very good and very old friends of mine, Mike and Mike, are applying to be on the show. I think they’d be great on it, although I do fear that they won’t be selected because they are too awesome, and thus the obvious, everyone-else-go-home winners, and maybe that’s bad TV? They should really work on bickering a lot more.

In any case, if you’re curious about what kind of people might be trying out for this sort of thing, or just how nuts my friends are, you can see their audition video on YouTube here and you can see really embarrassing pictures of them on their Facebook page here, and really guys, have you no shame? This isn’t America, you know.

Oh. Just remembered I can embed a YouTube video. DOH.

I had a Romancing the Stone moment this morning. I was working in my office and needed a tissue, but the box on the desk was empty. Then the box in the kitchen was empty, and in the downstairs powder room, there was no toilet paper left. All I needed was a piece of paper on the fridge that said, “Buy Tissue!” to complete the tableau. Unfortunately my fridge is not magnetic so I had to be content with getting a new box from the upstairs closet.

Man, I loved that movie as a kid. I’m sure I’ve seen it a dozen times, at least. Holland Taylor is THE BEST. “You practically puke on the escalator at Bloomingdales!” Awesome.

So in case you didn’t notice from the graphic discussion of tissue, I am sick, yet again. I am really having trouble accepting it this time. Back in the fall, I was so ridiculously healthy that I actually started to believe that my immune system had passed into a higher state of being. That I was moving forward like an X-Men mutant into a new dawn of the human race, where no one would get sick ever, and I was non-patient zero. Super! Lynn!

And now, since January, it’s been one thing after another, sick, sick, then more sick, with barely a break in between. Guess that new age of evolution has to wait a little longer. At least the kids have avoided the last couple of rounds (so far, knock wood).

Speaking of kids and sick and superhuman immune systems, do you remember that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where a bunch of kids on a foreign planet had been specially bred by their parents to have immune systems that not only kept the kids healthy, but also attacked germs floating in the air around them? Only it turned out that their overly aggressive immune systems also attacked the healthy cells of other people, so they eventually killed their own parents, and had to be quarantined on the planet alone?

Huh. Now that I type that all out I guess it’s not a bad thing to be Not Non-Patient Zero. I kind of like life and my kids and everything. You can learn valuable lessons from Science Fiction, apparently.

So I’m off now to curl up on the couch with some hibiscus tea and a big box of tissues and a video from the library. It’s Easter Parade, my all-time favourite musical, and I could write a whole post on the dreamy way Fred Astaire says “Baby…baby” while knocking on Judy Garland’s door at the end, so you’re lucky I’m too sick to sit upright at the computer any longer.

Ah, Fred…you certainly are no Mr. Mondo Dismo.

Lately we have developed a problem around here with the Captain, and it’s this: there’s nothing to do.

Oh I know, all kids have down times where they are bored with the same old toys, there’s bad weather outside, and all their friends are busy. But with the Captain, this is turning into a permanent state of being, and it’s driving us all crazy.

He used to be really into Lego, but now that we own every single set ever created, BY GOD, he’s kind of growing out of it. He still likes playing with the minifigs from the various sets, setting up dialogs between them, occasionally recreating scenes from TV shows or movies. But unless Gal Smiley is available to imagine along with him, he’s bored. He is no longer into building for building’s sake, or creating for creating’s sake.

He is not an artistic guy at all – he still stick-figures his drawings for school and art class is like torture for him. He doesn’t want to paint or colour or glue collages. He is not interested in science – whereas Gal Smiley can spend all day creating elaborate experiments, or building solar cars, or testing electrical circuits, he just doesn’t want to bother. He isn’t curious or into learning new things in his spare time.

We had hoped he would be a reader, and while he has taken baby steps these past months into reading on his own, it’s clear it will never consume him, the way it does other kids who always try to sneak a book onto their lap at the dinner table, or under the covers at night. If we tell him to go read, he’ll read on his own for a half hour or so, but that’s it. Efforts to engage him in board games or card games are refused, unless it’s Sorry, where he can use his minifigs as the players, and DEAR LORD, if I have to play one more game of Sorry I may do something drastic.

He’s not a sporty guy, and he hates the outdoors. He has no interest in going outside just for the sake of it. We force him to take swimming lessons, which he despises, and he’s happy with his once-weekly soccer lesson, which lets him see his buddies, and isn’t interested in working on his skills or taking it any further. All other sports have been roundly rejected.

Of course, he’d play video games all the live-long day if we would let him, but we try to limit his screen time, so he’s on a very fixed income when it comes to the Wii. We tried to get him interested in other computer-like stuff – simple programming languages, say, or making stop-motion movies using his minifigs, but all that stuff was too much like school and he refused.

So what does he do with his time? Mostly he skulks. He’s an expert skulker. We’ll find him sitting on his bed in his room, in the dark, just sitting there doing nothing. We’ll find him wandering endlessly up and down the hallway, up and down, up and down, nowhere to go, no plans, just being aimless. We’ll find him lying on the couch in the TV room, staring at the ceiling. Just staring, for like, hours at a time.

It’s kind of freaking us out. I don’t know if it’s his age (nearly 10), his personality (he is generally fearful and quiet and withdrawn), or his gender (we have the opposite problem with the girls, who are both so interested and into EVERYTHING that we are constantly trying to limit their activities).

The other day I sat him down for a Serious Talk about this. I told him I felt he needed some kind of hobby. I started suggesting stuff he might like, and he actually cried from the stress of having to choose something. So I backed off, and he went back to staring at the wall. GAH.

What do your boys like to do? What did you like to do when you were 10? I’m all out of ideas here.

So, I’ve been sick this week. We made it all through the fall illness-free, and trust me, I was knocking wood and throwing salt and chanting prayers on a continuous basis to keep that going. We even lasted all through the holidays with no one getting sick, for possibly the first time ever, which was so, so amazing.

Then I got cocky and thought we were going to go through the whole winter sick-free, likely due to this miracle drug we had discovered, called vitamin C, perhaps you have heard of it? I thought our rock solid immune systems were ON IT.

So of course, January, and now February, has been one thing after another, and I feel like I should just give up already and buy my own Kleenex factory, because it would be cheaper, SERIOUSLY.

Last week I had a classic cold, along with the Little Miss, and I was just getting over it when, on Saturday, I got a little tickle in my throat, and although that seems like Impossible Karma, it was indeed the dawn of a new illness.

By Sunday my throat felt like a thousand tiny knives, swallowing was impossible, and my tonsils were actually VISIBLE bulging out the sides of my neck, which was pretty horrifying.

I have this thing where I have become really against going to the doctor. It’s partly because getting in to actually SEE the doctor is so hard. You can get an appointment that’s about a week out for important but non-urgent things, like say a funny mole or an ingrown toenail or a lazy eye. You can get an appointment that’s about six months out for things like annual physicals or yearly checkups for the kids.

Anything else, you need to come in during walk-in hours, which are only in the evenings, where you are stuck in a small room for, literally, HOURS, with dozens of other sick people, often waiting with three cranky children, only to see the doctor for five minutes. Walk-in hours have become an avoid-at-all-costs situation for me.

There’s also the fact that, as part of my continuing avoidance of walk-in hours, I’ve learned that 90% of things will Just Go Away. Wait it out! Everything will be just fine! Even things that used to send my mom racing to the doctor for meds, like a fever or an ear infection or a sore throat, are likely to just go away if you give them a good 48 hours of lying around on the couch with a trashy magazine and bag of cookies (mandatory germ treatments, of course).

So my point here is that I tried really, really hard to live with the Throat of Knives for several days, only to finally cave in on Tuesday night and go to the dreaded walk-in hours, where they warned me there was a two hour plus wait, and then I wound up getting in to see a doctor in 20 minutes.

Plus, she said it was strep throat, and gave me this newfangled medicine for it, called antibiotics, perhaps you have heard of it?

And then I went and got said antibiotics, and took said antibiotics, and LO, I WAS BETTER. Like literally, I was sitting on the couch drinking tea, one moment feeling like total crap, then suddenly, my tonsils were a bit smaller and things were a bit less painful and my ear canals drained and I FELT BETTER. I felt like I could win an Olympic medal, solve world hunger, AND catch up on the entire season of Parenthood which is still sitting on my PVR, all in one evening.

I was superwoman!

So the moral of this story is: modern medicine actually works. Who knew?

Postscript: Of course, now Sir Monkeypants is totally in Throat of Knives land, and our Valentine’s Day plans, which we NEVER would have made on any other year, are totally blown. But still! Modern medicine! Superwoman! All is well, people, all is well.

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.”