Vintage

This was our wedding gift, sewn with love by my Aunt Betty in 1984. 

I believe that, until her final illness, Aunt Betty sewed every single day of her life. It was her great joy, and everyone in our family has an heirloom to remember her by. When she passed, my Aunt Betty left her vintage 1936 Singer sewing machine to my daughter Katie. I am lucky to be housing the beautiful machine until my daughter has a place in her home for it.

It's more than a little embarrassing, however, that it sat in our home for several years (I've lost track) before I finally got around to opening it up. That's partly because the drawers were so jam-packed with stuff that they wouldn't even close properly.

Good Christmas

As I sit here enjoying my turkey sandwich, I've been trying to figure out what made this Christmas so different from other years. So much better.

It wasn't that I didn't make an all-in Christmas dinner (including egg-wheat-dairy-free variations for one daughter). And it wasn't that I didn't make elaborate to-do lists. (See photo above.)

In Praise of Dirty Diapers

Katie on her change table.

If you had a choice to delegate all diaper changes (especially poopy ones) to a nanny, would you? At one time, I might have answered a resounding YES, but our first child taught me something.

Bursting with Pride

A hug for the graduate. (And when did I get so short?)

I am so flipping proud of this girl that I can hardly write this without tears coming to my eyes. Today, our daughter Katie received her B.A. in English Literature (and a minor in Spanish), with High Distinction, from Carleton University. That alone is cause for celebration and pride, but what really impresses me is how hard Katie has struggled to reach this milestone.

Watching Them Take Flight

Katie

I can still see her -- taking wide-legged steps walking from me to Stephen, gradually gaining confidence as her balance improved, until she could walk on her own. And now she kickboxes.

I remember watching her go down the big slide and forcing myself to take a step back so she wouldn't know I was afraid for her safety. She ignored me completely and just went for it. And now she's doing it again.

Handmade Christmas: "Santa Hat" Party Mix

Christmas 2012

One of the nice things about handmade gifts is that you can tailor them to the recipient. In our case, our daughters both have gluten and dairy sensitivities, which makes a lot of snack foods off limits.

When I saw this adorable recipe with Santa hats, I decided to give it a shot, especially for Katie who has always had a love of Santa hats.

Deck the halls!

I can't believe it's mid-December and we just put up our Christmas tree tonight. If Katie and Emily hadn't put their minds to it, we might have gone tree-less this year!

Ever since Emily learned the professional way to decorate a tree (part of her co-op placement at Ikea), she has been our master tree-adorner.

A Handmade Christmas: More Time than Money

This is our tree-topper angel. The tree is not up yet at our house.

Quitting my job just before Christmas was probably not a great idea if I planned to spoil my loved ones. However, it does mean I actually have time and enough spare energy so I can make at least part of our gifts.

Cake Wreck

Mmmmmmm

I haven't made fudge since I was a newlywed. It didn't work. I don't have the patience to boil the sugar, cream, and butter to the right temperature, so my fudges always turn out more like puddings.  Well, that changed tonight when I accidentally made fudge when I was trying to make frosting for Katie's birthday cake.

The picture above is what happened when I placed a dollop of the "frosting" on top of the cake. It almost instantly solidified.

It cracked the cake.
(The goo is black currant jam.)

In the time it took me to grab a spatula, the glob of goo turned into a mass of solid sugar.

There was NO budging that stuff.

Fortunately my family is one that laughs at mishaps such as these. So we plugged the candles into the fringe of cake surrounding the "frosting" and sang Happy Birthday off-key.

We didn't have 25 candles, so she blew out 12 1/2 candles, twice.

By the time we were ready to slice the cake, the fudge was so hard it couldn't be sliced. I guess I went beyond "soft ball" stage right to "hard ball." It sure looked odd, but it tasted delicious!

My favourite things about Christmas presents.

Christmas morning, sorting the presents!

When I was a kid, I could barely contain the excitement of Christmas morning.

Along with my four brothers and two sisters, I woke before dawn and threw myself upon my Christmas stocking. I honestly do not remember what order (order?) we followed to unwrap gifts, but I remember the absolute glee of the feast of presents.

Is there such a thing as "too much candy"?

I don't think so. (Yes, spoken as one who has diabetes, so take that into consideration.)

The other day several friends, including our daughter Katie, who goes by Kat with her friends, posted the following picture on Facebook.

Find the recipe (haha!) here.

I'd made gingerbread houses from kits before (with their insufficient number of candies - so frustrating!) and with graham crackers, too, but these? These were truly houses I could eat right down to the foundations!

Yesterday, I bought an obscene amount of candy, enough for three houses.

• 24 Kit Kat bars
• 3 Aero bars
• 3 boxes of Smarties (Canadian kind, not the American kind)
• 2 large bags of Skittles
• and more

Really, you don't need the full list. But, as you can see, I spent a pretty penny on this escapade. In the end, Katie couldn't join us for the celebration of sugar, but we decorated a house for her anyway.

Here is my own pile of Kit Kat bars.

Enough for one house. You can count seven, but there are eight in the pile.

As well as cutting out the cardboard forms for each of the houses, Steve decorated one. In very Engineer-orderly fashion, might I say. (He also took time to quibble with the orientation of the Kit Kat bars, arguing that a horizontal layout would give a better impression of a log cabin. He was right, of course, but I pointed to the rules and he went with the game plan.)

Steve's Kit Kat house, under construction

Likewise, Emily's showed some OCD influences.
Also, as she pointed out, some Halloween influences.

My own was a testament to improvisation and randomness.

I kind of got carried away decorating and forgot to take pictures, until Emily reminded me.

L-R; Emily's, mine, Steve's
The tree at front-centre is Emily's

Focus on Steve's house. His tree is in the foreground.

This may not have been the healthiest activity I've ever undertaken with my kids (kid, really, unless you count Steve, which he often does), but given the news of this past week and my lifelong need to actively fight depression, I count this as an afternoon well spent.

Nevertheless, I will be shipping the houses off to more suitable homes tomorrow.

Deck the Halls!

Today, my daughters came over to help me trim the Christmas tree.

Katie puts my favourite tiny baubles on the tree.

The girls were in a joyful mood and even played and sang along to AC/DC's "Big Balls." Definitely not my kind of holiday music, but we soon switched to my Ella Fitzgerald music. 

Steve played keep-away with the angel.

We decorated the new mantel.

The "ornament" is actually a placecard holder, but it's lost the holder part.

Afterwards, I had the girls pose for a couple of pictures.

And here is the result of their labour.

Seven Minutes to Heaven

Katie's birthday cake

UPDATED: Picture of the birthday girl!

On my first child's first birthday, I called my mother in a panic.

I'd bought gifts and balloons, I'd prepared snacks and I'd baked a cake. But I hadn't frosted it because I didn't have the recipe for my mother's famous Seven-Minute Frosting.

Affection

A token of romantic love.

The prompt for this month's Gratitude Journal entry is "love - of all kinds." In her note to those of us who have subscribed, Karen Walrond (a.k.a. Chookooloonks) writes,

Yet, it seems to me a pity that we devote an entire 24 hours to celebrate romantic love, and no time at all to celebrate all the other types of love that are all around us -- love that, let's face it, is at least as plentiful (if not more so) than romantic love.

So, although you all know how nuts I am for Stephen, for my post this month, I'm focusing on storge, "fondness through familiarity, especially between family members or people who have otherwise found themselves together by chance," according to Wikipedia.

Often, while I am sitting in my living room reading or surfing the net, I'll hear my kids in the sunroom kibitzing, joking (sometimes making fun of good, old Mom), and it warms my heart. I love the relationship my kids have with each other. Sometimes, it is intense; sometimes it is not much more than background music, but it is always There.

Three of our four: Peter, Emily, Brian (Katie wasn't available)

They aren't saints or best friends, and they don't usually snuggle this close, but they care about each other.

And I am so grateful for that. I've seen siblings who don't treat each other with respect, let alone with affection. That doesn't happen often here, thankfully.

Dream Re-Runs

Did you know that almost everyone has the dream where you're trying to drive the car from the back seat? Or the brakes are blown and you're trying not to crash and burn?

Apparently, that's a very common dream. I suspect it has to do with feeling that life is out of control. [Pause while I google to find out.] According to the Dream Dictionary, I'm not far off.

Cars are symbols of the real life conscious world. They are symbols of how you are progressing towards your goals. So think about the practical ways in which you have been moving towards your goals. Is the dream making some point about how well or how badly you are progressing. Are you heading in the right direction. A car at a standstill could suggest that you are taking a pause or that you have come up against some delay.

I've had that dream many, many times. I've also repeatedly had the flying dream, and the one about crumbling teeth, which is also apparently fairly common and apparently means something about the loss of something that should be permanent (a break-up or the death of a loved one).

But I also have a couple of other recurring dreams.

Darling Katie, not even one day old.

Babies!
Not surprisingly, I dream about babies often. But usually it's a really stressful dream: the baby is not my own, or there are too many babies to care for, or something is wrong. It's probably normal bad-mommy anxiety still playing out. If motherhood were remotely like these dreams, I would never have had four children.

Houses
Also an anxiety dream. The houses in my dreams are always my homes (in the dream, I mean, not in real life). They have rooms where you wouldn't expect them, are falling into disrepair, have indoor pools and secret passageways, multiple kitchens, and built-in beds. I've dreamt of cottages sinking into swamps, grand houses that could be featured in Architectural Digest, and just about everything in between. In all of these cases, things are in flux, something is incomplete (even in the mansions). I've also dreamt of my childhood home, but not often. [It was an irretrievably ill-designed house. Some day I will have to write about it, it was that bad.]

Tornadoes
These dreams started when we lived in Alabama and received training on what to do in case of such an emergency. In the summer, we had weekly tornado drills, with alarms. And we did have one tornado warning, meaning that tornadoes had been seen in the area. It was very frightening, and I remember hunkering in a linen closet with wee Katie, just months old, while sirens blared without stopping.

These are panicky dreams where I don't feel safe. [No shit, Sherlock.] They reached a peak when I was going through the most tumultuous time with my mother, before our estrangement began. The worst ones are where my tornado dreams and my baby dreams meld and I am trying to save children while this murderous force bears down on us. Mercifully, these are rare.

---

What about you? What are your recurring dreams, and what do you think they mean?

Gol-darn it! They smashed our shrub!

This morning was not a good morning, as those of you who are my Facebook friends already know. Just before I left for work, I posted this status:

Morning is already off to a failing start. Daughter went out in the middle of the night. We're out of cat food. Mulch was delivered before I even had my coffee. Had to move SIL's car so it wouldn't be blocked by the mulch, but I couldn't reach the clutch pedal. (Good thing our driveway is on a slope; I just rolled it.) Truck driver ripped the side off our shrub. 

Here's what I left behind.

And that's just one close-up.

There's a chunk taken out at the base of the trunk.
(Does anyone happen to know what kind of bush this is?)

Poor little bird's nest!
I think it had been vacated, but still.

There was significant leaf destruction.

It's kind of ironic (I think ... Jeff? Am I using "ironic" correctly?) that, with all the trucks, loaders, wheelbarrows, tree-cutters and deliveries we had for the pool and back yard landscaping, not once did any of them harm this poor little bush, though I was braced for it. (They did damage some bricks at the back corner of the house, but they repaired it almost immediately.)

In the end, we got our humongous pile of mulch, which Katie will spread over the back garden over the next few days.

That is one shirtload of pine mulch.

I will call the company tomorrow and find out what they can do for our poor bush.

Oh, and in case you're wondering about why I couldn't reach the clutch of my sister-in-law's car, it's not that my legs are short, but that my SIL is tall, as is anyone else who regularly drives her car, so she hasn't had to move the seat forward in so long that the tracks have rusted. Seriously thick rust, from salt-sprinkled winter boots. So I had to scrunch down to depress the pedals, while peering over the steering wheel.

It was stupid and possibly dangerous. Emily sagely asked me why I didn't ask the truck driver to move the car for me. But given what he did to the shrub, I'm not sure it would have turned out any better.

And the missing daughter (who left a note, so I knew where she was) turned up before noon, and Peter picked up some cat food. So all's well. Sort of.

Is nothing sacred?

At our house, birthdays are very serious affairs.
She is NOT doing the chicken dance.

Well. Katie was home for her birthday dinner and, while I was in the kitchen helping Emily and Peter prepared a Rice Krispies birthday cake, I heard the phrase, "Chicken Dance" from the living room, followed by raucous laughter.

"What?!" I yelped, and dashed into the living room, glaring at Stephen in dismay.

In this context (Katie's birthday) I could think of only one thing that would cause those two particular words to be uttered.

And I was right; Steve had divulged the TMI secret of Katie's conception. To our children! So now they know - and so do you.

Yes, the novelty tune that has been played at more weddings than "Here Comes the Bride" had something to do with Katie's conception. But, no, I'm not telling you what. All I WILL tell you is that nothing happened on the dance floor or in public.

I suppose there is a silver lining to this: none of OUR children will be playing that tune at their weddings. You're welcome.

Change of Life

Katie as a newborn, still in the gown the hospital put on her.
Don't you just want to sniff her?

Twenty-three years ago today, I gave birth to Katie, a 6 lb. 11 oz. little girl, on Easter Sunday in 1988. I was 25 years old.

I became a mother, at last. It was something I had yearned for for as long as I could remember. Seems my biological clock started ticking when I was about 15. I wanted a baby the way some politicians lust for power: it was a drive, a compulsion, an obsession.

I was so certain of wanting a baby that I used to declare it to university friends (à propos of what, I can't imagine) and had offers from volunteers to help me out, made in jest, of course. We all know that babies come with strings attached.

Eventually, of course, Steve and I chose those strings and tied the knot at an unimaginably young age (I was only 21, for heaven's sake!). Wisely, he insisted we wait a few years before starting a family.

So, thank you, Katie, for helping my dreams come true. I hope we can do the same for you.

Trial and Error and Error and Error

Our vintage single-lens-reflex (SLR) camera

Last weekend we popped into a photography store to have our passport photos taken. While there, I fell in lust with a nice little digital SLR camera kit (body and 18-200 lens).

For a while now I've been thinking about upgrading to a camera that allows me a little more artistic control. I love my point & shoot for its ease of use. It's small, it allows me to capture the moment with next to no fuss, and it still allows me to compose a decent picture. But it doesn't let me play with depth of field very much, and I would like to, especially on macro shots. I'd taken four semesters of photography back when I did my advertising diploma and wanted to be able to do more with my pictures.

The price tag on the sweet little kit was beyond my means, however, so it stayed in the store.

Coincidentally, we stumbled across the analog SLR that we had bought Katie way back when she was in high school. I decided to play with it while saving up for the digital one.
Using a "real" camera is like riding a bike, I thought, once you get your hands on it, all your skills will come flooding back. Right?

Wrong.

Here are a few tips to help those of you who venture backward in time or technology. (Also: don't forget to crank the advance lever after pressing the shutter release; allow time to focus your image; and bring extra film with you.)

Tip Number One: Make sure there is film in the camera. Those old-fashioned cameras do not alert you to the fact that you are shooting blanks, so to speak. That shutter will happily click away [Isn't the sound of a camera shutter just delightful?], the winder will wind. All to no avail. Thirty-nine shots later (undoubtedly overexposed and unfocused, but still), I realized my error.

Tip Number Two: When you do put film in, make sure it is actually gripped by the pins on the little turny-bobbin-thingy*. Twenty-six shots later, I conceded that the film was not moving through the camera. I fixed that and took another 24 pictures.

Tip Number Three: If, after taking all your pictures, you try to rewind the film into the cartridge and the rewinder stops moving, do not force it. The film WILL snap off of the cartridge. If you then open the back of the camera to confirm that this is what just happened, your spool of film will be exposed and useless.

Tip Number Four: If error number three has happened to you once, doing the same thing again will result in the same situation.

This time, however, I left the back shut and brought the camera to a photo store with a darkroom. There, the salesperson patronizingly asked me if I'd pressed the rewind button conveniently located on the bottom of the camera and without any label.

Um, nope. Didn't see that. Didn't think it was important.

She then instructed me no fewer than five times that I needed to press the rewind button before turning the rewind crank. After the fourth time and while she was reiterating for the fifth time, I said (somewhat rudely, I confess), "Yes, I get it: I need to press the button."

I guess I wasn't scathing enough, however, as she told me a sixth time, when she brought the camera back out to me after retrieving the film. Or maybe she was just being passive-aggressive.

So here I sit, having "taken" more than 100 pictures, with nothing to show for my efforts. It's a little anticlimactic. Sure, in three days, I'll have 24 of my pictures, but heaven only knows if any of them are any good at all. I've become accustomed to instant gratification.

I suspect I'll be investing in that digital SLR sooner rather than later. Stay tuned.

*The correct term for the turny-bobbin-thingy is "film transport sprocket." Totally useless information.

Λατρεύω την κόρη μου.

No, I did not fall asleep on my keyboard with the font set to "Wingdings." That text up there, according to Google translate, says, "I love my daughter." It transliterates as, "Latrév̱o̱ ti̱n kóri̱ mou."

Tonight I realized that I hadn't spent much one-on-one time with Katie. In fact, it's been years since just the two of us went out to dinner. In light of my New Year's Resolution to spend more individual time with each of my kids, I invited her out for dinner. We decided on Greek. I ordered one of my favourite snacks: spanakopita, a fillo pastry stuffed with spinach and feta and garlic.

Nom nom nom!

Katie ordered this:

Yes, yes that is a tentacle. Of an octopus.

Um. Are those suction cups?

Why, yes, they are suction cups. Have I mentioned that I do not enjoy eating things with recognizable body parts? Suction cups (which apparently is the technical term; I checked) are identifiable body parts. And they are icky. Katie, however, loved them. She said it tasted like cheese, which she loves but can no longer eat, so she was delighted.

For my part, I averted my gaze and enjoyed my pastry.

More important than the food, of course, were the conversation and the company -- both of which were very convivial. My daughter is really no longer a girl, but a woman, one whom I quite like and enjoy spending time with.

Still, next time I'll let her dad take her out for cephalopod.