Telling stories every which way

Emily has a MacBook.  Need I say more?  Oh, I probably will.  Robyn, or as she is more commonly known, (but not by me), Bynny has been making progress towards toddlerdom, and Emily has been collecting proof.



We're focussing on Robyn right now, as we have on all the children at  the various stages of their lives. Pictures trigger the stories, video too, but so do the mismatched socks, the mangled books, the forgotten stuffy that used to be the favourite, the TV shows we watched together, the place we ordered Chinese.

I've been known to be boring on the subject of telling yourself and your children the stories you want remembered.  At the risk of being so yet again, it is so worth it.

Select Christmas photos

Lego? clementine? hmmmm.

One of my favourite pictures of Chris, ever

Robyn: Scottish or Chinese?  Cute!

Emily in a hat we brought from France

What do you think?  Father and daughter?

Emma and paisley elephant

Julia, perplexed by a clue to her next gift

We are not all depicted here, but some of the photos are not worthy.  Not from a memorable point of view, but simply based on vanity.  We have a family rule about that.  And of course, Pat, the official photographer, took no photos of himself.

Christmas is as Christmas was

Wow!  Christmas and Boxing Day zipped by in a flash.  It was a nice flash, but exhausting, and nothing out of the ordinary actually came up.

We did spend a lot of time in the kitchen, as the kids came over for Christmas Eve, Christmas morning and Christmas dinner.  At one point, although there were only 8 of us for dinner, there were 4 of us in the kitchen, all doing things to broccoli and gravy, and bumping into each other, although that may have been due to the wine.

For many years, starting when my parents began hosting both kids and grandkids, it's been our family tradition to have "WifeSaver" for Christmas breakfast.  You make pans of what are essentially ham and cheese sandwiches, cover them with an egg and milk mixture and leave them in the fridge overnight, then pop them in the oven in the morning, thus saving the wives from over-exerting themselves.  I don't know how you account for the time it takes to make twelve sandwiches, arrange them in dishes, cover them with saran wrap and remind yourself several times to put them in the fridge, then several times in the morning to put them in the oven, but in the seventies, we seemed to worry about the quality of life.

I am not encouraging anyone to make "WifeSavers", unless you really, really like bad puns, but I do encourage family traditions.  No matter what the state of those damn wifesavers, from cheesy-bubbly to dry and blackened, everybody looks forward to them, because we always have them.   Just as we always have eye-shadow for the women's stockings and  jokey key-chains and bottle-openers for the guys'.

Except for the people around the table, nothing changes very much and man! we like it that way.

Sinceeeeeeerely....

As I've done every year since I started blogging in 2004, I've made a donation to Children's Literacy on your behalf.  Thanks for being my friend, my family, my scoffer, my commenter, my blog-reading-provider, my Facebook "liker" or my next-door neighbour and have a Merry, Merry Christmas.

From Christmas morning 2009

In space, no one can hear you scream

Hmmm

No pictures of Emma on the ski hill

No pans of butterscotch squares

No shortbread

No manicure or pedicure

No video of the Spindillyrushtons singing and dancing at the Christmas pot luck

No viewing of The Black Swan

No poinsettias

No rest for the wicked

Just a temporary black hole in the continuum of Christmas joy

The sound of one hand flapping....

Emma slept over on Friday night.

A different sleepover, the same funny Emma

Friday night has been sleepover night for Emily and Robyn since Robyn was born; we established the sleepover on the premise of being able to help Emily get some sleep, which because Friday (and only those Fridays when they're here), is the only night I ever sleep through, has been less than successful.  Fun, engaging, exciting, endearing and totally calming for me.  No matter how fussy Robyn is, I sleep like the baby we want her to be.  Ironic, yet so typical of our best laid plans.

So this Friday, we were five, one of whom was wonderfully excited at being able to play with her baby cousin, and totally unaware of how different she was from an 11-month old.  We had dinner together, some of us had a play-bath together, and we wisely broke into two factions just before bedtime, Emma and I being the faction in the bedroom, in which apparently, the TV is central.  We watched The Polar Express.  I found it a tad scary, what with a red-mittened ghost and 9 year old kids hanging off an out of control steam train, but maybe I'm too sensitive.

Saturday morning, raspberry pancakes behind us, Emma and I went to prepare our condo common room for a party that's happening Sunday night.  We set up tables and schlumped chairs, decorated a tree or two, and sang along to computer-generated Christmas carols.  And Emma danced.  And danced.  And danced in her stocking feet with strips of goldfoil wrapping paper streaming behind her.  And then went out with Dave to toboggan the hill that slopes down to the kayak run.

A totally different, equally lovely, experience  from last week's sleepover with Julia.  Dave took photos which I'll be able to post tomorrow, if we have time to discuss downloading today.  

Yet another bubble burst

I don't know if it's just me, but it seems that the 24 hours I used to have in my day have been either compressed or rejigged.  Sleep has been compressed to 4 hours, morning has been reduced to breakfast and internet but expanded to 6 hours and the other 14 race by except when I'm in the car.

This is not what I had anticipated for my years of retirement.  I had seen a late to bed, late to rise rhythm with long stretches of books and a glass of wine, bubble-enriched reading in the tub, elegant snacks, nutritious dinners, leisurely and popcorn-enabled viewing of old British mysteries on DVD, walks to pristine natural locales where I could soak up (city) nature, all to be balanced by refined mall-trawling.

 

Toast, Coffee? Later....

I got up early this morning because I was hungry and longed for my coffee and because I knew it was going to take me all the rest of the morning to get ready for my lunch date with the glamorous Dutch Woman.  So why am I still hungry, still coffeeless and still wondering if I have anything eye-catching but not too gaudy to wear to lunch.

I think I must, in my own way, be confessing to an addiction to g-mail, facebook, blogging and blog-reading in no particular order of preference.

I can remember when I was afraid I'd end up addicted to science-fiction and fantasy, another time when I worried about Prozac, another when I thought my obsession about my family would lead me to a kind of drooling nirvana.  It never occurred to me that my downfall would be the internet.

Bring on the (guilt) trip

I just read an article in Macleans magazine about how my generation is leaving a dire present for their children:  fewer jobs, lower pay, higher taxes, bleaker futures.  I say my generation but being born during the Second World War means that technically I am a pre-Boomer.  Dave is full-fledged though.

We always think with gratitude that we were the last of the Need a Job? Choose from among these...people.  I certainly didn't seek out that status, or step on anyone to get it, or abuse it when I had it.  I don't want to feel personally responsible, because of my accident of birth, for the fact that my own children are suffering fewer jobs, lower pay, higher taxes, bleaker futures.  Does someone really think that I'm gloating about that, snickering with my aged boomer friends about how we screwed Gen X Y and the as-yet-unnamed generations that follow?

Granted, I did not personally call my MP to complain that life was good and could something be done about that.

I did get involved with the volunteer community, supported the United Way campaigns, wrote letters to Amnesty International and boycotted lettuce, carrots, grapes, red meat, gender-exclusive activities and printing e-mails ---all at appropriate times.  I didn't kick puppies or push razor blades into Hallowe'en apples.

I do care that my kids can't have their pick of jobs and that their mortgages are hellish-high and that day care costs almost as much as one parent earns.  I think it is a shame that in a few years, there will be more retired people than workers, and that those of us who lived to this ripe old age are going to need health care.  I just don't know why suddenly it's both a universal surprise and my fault.

R U Listening, Macleans???

Cordially yours,
Pre-Boomer Left-leaning Totally-selfish Canadian Woman.

And So It Begins

Family Gingerbread House 2010

Watching Movies from The Christmas Fort

Julia stayed for a sleepover last night, then in her traditional way, denuded the house to make a fort---this one was really special; she designed it as a shelter for injured animals (which doesn't explain why she and I are in it) with the protection of the Christmas Wizard and with the culinary assistance of Wizard's Assistant Dave, making raspberry pancakes in the kitchen.

Next week, Emma will have a sleepover, with who knows what result?

A funny thing happened on the way to my golden age

Actually, several strange things happened, in no particular reporting order:

• Dave became interested in every form of domestic decision that ever gets made at our house
• I started to see my mother in shop windows, realizing with a thump that I was in fact seeing myself
• The knees that were an invisible unprepossessing part of my body  became the sometimes throbbing centre of my universe
• My glasses became the thing people could safely compliment me for
• Everybody except me in Starbucks would be carded if they were drinking wine instead of coffee
• Flat shoes, as long as they have some shine and/or glitter have taken on a whole new glamour
• People who used to say I was too young to have kids that old, are telling me how I'm holding up so well
• At a party, someone in the room says "fuck!" and everyone tells me they're sorry
• Wielding a broom today has the same effect as carrying two cases of beer for 10 blocks 20 years ago
• At the cosmetic counter, no one ever points me to the sparkly pink gloss anymore
• I buy it anyway then the next day, I try to make my daughters take it
• When I buy jeans, the waist size is bigger than the hip size used to be
• Things I used to do for fun are now things I do if I've overindulged
• "If I've overindulged" has become a euphemism for "I've had two, no three, glasses of wine" or more than four sugars in my coffee
• My income has decreased by 75% and my needs have increased by the same amount
• People actually listen to my advice and I therefore give it more often
• I used to exercise judgment but now I apparently never know when to stop

Unless you're counting now.

Even worse behaviour.

So yesterday, I wrote about storing my laptop on my bedside table.  Not smart.

Even not smarter?  Tonight, as I was going to get in bed to watch some TV, I knocked over a glass of red wine, over my laptop, my harmony noises machine, my nightgown, my slippers, my favourite leather bag and down two of the walls in my corner of the room.

Apart from a certain raffish smell, my laptop seems allright.  I am not.  And the harmony noises are not helping.

ADDENDUM 
Also lost in the War of the Stupid, my nightgown, my slippers, a bag of clothes I was going to return, a crocheted and jewelled bag I had just made for a friend for Christmas, my Kobo leather envelope, and a pair of crocheted fingerless gloves with 22 buttons (22!!!) sewn on last week. My bedroom smells like a cross between Home and Garden Kitchens and a sleazy neighbourhood bar, and the damn TV program I was going to watch isn't even on.  Woe.

Age-inappropriate behaviour, for any age.

A while ago, I moved my laptop from the kitchen counter to my night table---I know, but a laptop has to live somewhere.  It was my intention to use my lapdesk, at different appropriate places, to hold the LT while I was working on it.

Here's how that worked out.  I keep looking at the laptop, cover down, sitting on the night table, and can't resist checking to see if Shoppers Drug Mart has sent me an e-mail or if all my friends on Facebook have simultaneously changed their profile pictures.  Important things happen in my life, and I like to stay current.  After a glance or two, I give up, go over to the night table, get down on my knees on a not-thick-enough sheepskin and fire up the internet.

Two hours later, I need Robaxicet for my back, Advil for my knees and I swear, a lobotomy would be nice.

Blues for Harry

When I was a kid, I was known, and ridiculed I thought, for being an easy crier.  I didn't cry when I got hurt---I was a careful and stoic kid.  I would cry over TV programs:  Lassie (for the people, for the PEOPLE), Dumbo, late movies with tragic endings; I cried over books, over music (think Puff the Magic Dragon); I cried at Mass when things got intense, although when my brothers got woozy from the incense, it made me giggly.  From the time I was in my teens, none of my friends was spared the lets go for coffee (Lorna cries) experience. 

I was also a champion laugher.  As I remember it, my sisters and I couldn't get through dinner without laughing till we choked or got sent to another room.  We would get to the stage where we couldn't drink or eat without collateral damage to our dear ones, where I would ineffectively dredge up mental images of Anne Boleyn climbing the steps to the guillotine and occasionally to the place where I would find myself laughing, crying and hiccuping all at the same time.  While I didn't revel in this ability, I kind of liked it because I thought it showed the real me.  As opposed to the bare-midriffed, faux platinum person with the shaved eyebrows and the size 7 feet in size 6 heels.

When I was in my 30s, I always seemed at one extreme end of the spectrum---deliriously happy or tragically sad, and I wasn't so thrilled about it as I didn't seem to have much control over either end---red-eyed crier or red-cheeked laugher.

Some time after that, I discovered that I had issues with chemical balance and emotions, and began a long journey of natural and chemical medication balanced sometimes with therapy and long bouts of exhausting pretending-I-was-well.  Luckily for me, I found the right doctor and the right medication at the same time---the downside, although I didn't think it was at the time, was the loss of the extreme ends of the emotional spectrum.

Lately though, I've found myself laughing dangerously raucously on the phone with my sister, or while playing board games with the family.  Apart from breathlessness, and sore ribs, I hardly gave it a thought.

Today, Dave and I were doing some work around the house and as we usually do, we put on some appropriate old-school music.  For me, if I'm working hard, Meat Loaf is just right.  Dave likes an eclectic mix and we settled for a playlist I'd labelled "Friday Morning Work Music" back in 2006, and which neither of us had heard since.  We both got caught by surprise with Harry Chapin's song about two lonely people, A Better Place to Be, which lucky for you, I don't know how to embed.  Dave looked over at me and smiled because it's one of the songs we both love, but as soon as he did, I realized I was going to cry.  I had no clue that I was going to sob, make that choky sound and have to run into the bedroom because teary and distraught isn't my best look.

It made me realize that a couple of things have affected me emotionally recently: many of the "It Gets Better" videos, the youtube flash mob versions of The Hallelujah Chorus, pictures of the kids and grandchildren as babies, accidentally pulling out of my bag a comb of my mother's that I've had for years.

I don't actually think that these dips into my stronger emotions require an uppage of my medication---I really hope it doesn't, as I find I still like to cry and laugh really hard.

And I have the family and friends to help me do it.

OK, the frilly gloves come off

I am more than a grandmother.  Really.


But since I'm at least 7.5% grandmother, I'm obliged to post this darling video of Robyn, Emily and Morgan's 10 month old daughter.