That Novel I’ve Been Working On

July 26 was the 8-year anniversary of the day Mike stood up in front of a small group of our family and closest friends and promised to love, honour, and cherish me even though I have no idea where our ironing board is. Our friend Bethany babysat for a couple of hours and we went out to dinner at our favourite restaurant in Guelph, where we discussed how much our lives have changed in the past year and then argued a little bit about the role government should play in administering social services. It was a lovely evening and pretty representative of our marriage, as was the pro tip Mike whispered conspiratorially to Ellie the other day when I disappeared into our room to get changed into (as I put it) “real pants” only to appear again wearing my purple plaid pajama bottoms: “Just so you know, when Mommy says ‘pants’ she ALMOST ALWAYS means ‘pajamas’.”

There’s no denying I’m a very lucky woman.

Lest I give you the mistaken impression that my life is now all long, luxurious sleeps and snuggly babies in feetie pajamas, I feel I need to disclose that sometimes it’s also taking 90 minutes to complete the 45-minute bedtime routine while Mike is at baseball, and staggering exhausted to the basement only to discover a giant centipede that withstood 8 smashes with a heavy book before finally dying in a fashion that was unconvincing enough I keep going back to check if it’s still dead. (Yes, I am leaving the carcass for Mike to clean up when he gets home. I AM ONLY HUMAN, PEOPLE.)

In related news, we must move immediately. Does anyone want to buy an adorable 3-bedroom home on a quiet cul-de-sac? Priced to move. Only somewhat infested with horrifying unkillable insects.

Pleasant side effects of having a baby:

• For some reason, I feel less silly talking to Ellie than I do when I talk to the pets. Possibly because she often smiles in agreement when I pass judgment on the wardrobes of Food Network show hosts. (Why the yoga capris, Matt Dunnigan? WHY?!)
• People say Ellie looks like me. People also say she is very cute. By way of transitive property, me = very cute.
• There is always someone available to snuggle on a moment’s notice. Especially lovely when that someone is wearing footie pajamas.

Not entirely unpleasant side effects of having a baby that still require some adjustment on my part: Read the rest of this entry »

I have a plant in my office that starts at the top left corner of a very tall bookcase, then crawls across the top of the bookcase, down the side, and then a few feet across the floor. I’ve cut it back a few times, but I tend to let it grow, mostly out of fascinated curiosity. How long will it possibly GROW? I hardly ever water it, and the room is dark this time of year due to an overgrown maple tree right outside the window. It somehow thrives in spite of this, and there is a very real possibility that the plant will eventually eat us or kill us in our sleep, which is why I named it Rick Moranis. (Well, the other reason I named it Rick Moranis is because of a miscommunication with Mike, wherein he referenced Little Shop of Horrors and I incorrectly thought he meant that Rick Moranis played the plant.) At any rate, having a plant named thusly is enjoyable for two reasons: firstly, it is oddly entertaining to refer to a plant by both a first name and last name, due to the feeling of formality it gives the plant, and secondly, when Mike says things like “Your plant is OUT OF CONTROL!” I can indigantly and coldly respond with, “HE HAS A NAME YOU KNOW.” Read the rest of this entry »

I had a whole blog post typed yesterday, but I ended up discarding it because I was complaining about something that makes me sound like a jerk, and thankfully I realized that before I hit the publish button. There are just some things that I think I should just keep to myself, or maybe just grumble to Mike, because he loves me and as my husband is legally obligated to listen to me even when I sound like an idiot. At any rate, I will share something that will likely still make some people hate me, but it is so new and exciting to me, I just can’t keep it to myself.  Read the rest of this entry »

Before Ellie arrived, I think I was aware (at least on some level) that the only thing predictable about this whole parenthood thing would be the complete and total inability to predict any aspect of it from one moment to the next. I don’t think I ever could have realized, though, just how dizzying the highs would be, how terrifying the lows would be, and how the whole process would be completely devoid of creamy middles. It’s like a rollercoaster. Or rather, it’s like how I THINK a rollercoaster would be, because I hate any sort of ride that reaches speeds any faster than I can achieve on my bicycle, and on the rare occasions I have visited an amusement park in the past, I have wiled away the hours eating funnel cake, holding purses, and wishing I wasn’t such a chicken. Read the rest of this entry »

So there is a baby. She’s been here almost 3 weeks, in fact, but I’m just getting around to this now because although I have become quite adept at doing a number of things one-handed, typing a blog post one letter at a time wasn’t something I was too eager to accomplish. Even now, the baby is awake on my shoulder, making this a bit more difficult than I had anticipated. She’s awake far more often now than she was for the first week or two, and although she is generally a very happy sort of baby, I’m finding it is requiring a bit of adjustment on my part, because I know what to do with a sleeping baby (snuggle it, obviously, and look admiringly at it, and tell it quietly that it’s the cutest baby ever) but I don’t have the first clue what to do with a baby that is awake. Especially if it is awake at 3:00 in the morning, like this particular baby was last night, when she has thus far been a pretty good sleeper and we had gotten used to a nice quiet night-time routine of uneventful feeding and sleeping. (I have discovered already that parenthood is very much about continually adjusting expectations. I have also discovered that parenthood is not, or at least should not be, about wearing v-neck t-shirts, because that is a sure-fire way to end up with barf in your cleavage.)

Anyway, she arrived at 11:11 on April 28, weighing in at a nice average 7 pounds 3 ounces, and while her arrival was a little difficult and generally pretty unpleasant she has, since then, been a pleasure to be around pretty much 90% of the time (for the other 10%, see above re: 3:00 a.m.) as she is a very easygoing sort of baby in a way that I believe confirms her paternity pretty conclusively (not that there was every any doubt in my mind, but it is still nice nonetheless to see that she has at least one of Mike’s most wonderful character traits). Of course, there’s always someone who sees or hears how nicely she is adjusting to life on the outside, as it were, and feels the need to tell us to not bother enjoying it, because it is just going to get SO MUCH WORSE, which frankly is a phenomenon that we find more than a  little bit mystifying, but I guess I will just have to shelve it in my brain with all the OTHER things I don’t understand, like calculus and why people feel the need to put peas in perfectly good soups and/or pot pies.

Before we had her, people told me reassuringly/terrifyingly that in many ways our lives would change dramatically, and in many other ways things would stay remarkably the same. I think that is a pretty accurate assessment of the situation. In a lot of ways, her arrival into our family and our lives has totally rocked my world, and in other ways it kind of feels like she was always meant to be here. I hope she feels that way too.

I have a secret confession to make: if there was any scenario in which it would make sense for me to do so, I would seriously consider packing it all in to become a famous archaeologist. The idea of hunting for glittering reservoirs of long-lost treasure fills me with such excitement I don’t even know how to explain it. I have watched the movie National Treasure more times than any one person should really watch such a terrible movie (and it really IS terrible, but it stars Nicolas Cage, who is at the top of my Celebrity Free Pass List, for reasons I don’t understand and can’t explain) (or at least he WAS at the top of that list, until he got arrested last week for domestic violence) (but I’m too heartbroken to really comment on that at this point) and every time they unearth the treasure (spoiler alert!) I actually get goosebumps. Read the rest of this entry »

I am a delinquent blogger lately, partially because my brain seems to be taken up almost entirely with “BABY BABY BABY” these days and I didn’t want to bore those of you out there to whom this would not be particularly interesting, and partially because I was working like crazy in March to finish up a bunch of projects so I could start my maternity leave. I did finish them, and am a lady of leisure until such a time as the baby decides to make her appearance, but I finished up my last project and immediately came down with a cold, and spent most of my available blogging time last week moping about the house, watching old episodes of Mad About You that I had planned to save for after the baby’s arrival.

On the “BABY BABY BABY” front (speaking of fronts, mine is HUGE) I was full term last week and am now in that uncomfortable, exciting, and terrifying no man’s land between fully-cooked-baby and fully-delivered-baby where you do loads of tiny laundry and try not to panic because in less than a month, there will be one of those baby things LIVING IN YOUR HOUSE. Mike is, of course, completely zen about all of this, and helps me off the couch and checks to make sure I haven’t gotten stuck in the bathtub and takes care of yardwork while I drink juice on the deck. I am generally astounded by how he manages to keep his wits about him in the face of what is about to happen, but this is not new behaviour for him and one of the many reasons why I married him (i.e. so that things continue to get done around the house while I sit on the couch under a pile of cats and daydream about eating raw cookie dough with a glass of wine on the side).

We had our first prenatal class last night, and in amongst all kinds of useful information was this little gem: apparently conventional wisdom in the 1980s recommended that a woman approaching the end of her pregnancy always carry a jar of pickles with her wherever she went, so that she could smash the pickle jar on the ground and alleviate any potential embarrassment if her water were to break in public.  I … can’t quite figure this one out.  Unless you were at a grocery store or a church picnic, wouldn’t a broken jar of pickles suddenly appearing on the scene raise more questions than it would answer?