No singing!

I have an odd habit: I burst into snippets of song at random moments. These impulsive musical moments sometimes just burst out of my subconscious, but they are usually triggered by something that someone says - something that reminds me of a song. Sometimes it's the rhythm of a phrase, sometimes it's a combination of words.

Someone might chide my pessimism by saying, "Don't give up on us," and I will start singing, "Don't give up on us, baby, we're still worth one ... more try." (Ah, grade 9.)

Most of the songs that are deeply wired into my brain got there when I was in my teens and are completely unknown to my kids. So they really have no idea whether I'm making it up or not. They might make a simple request like, "Don't back up on us," as we're getting ready to pull out of the driveway, and I will burst into, "Don't back up on us, daddy, we're still worth one ... more drive."

What's worse is that most of the time I don't even realize I'm doing it. It drives the kids crazy. Especially Brian. At least once a day, he chastizes me, "Mom! You're singing!"

I usually stop, only to start unintentionally singing again moments later because, as I've reminded the kids several times, "A singing mom is a happy mom." When I'm happy, I sing.

And, poor Brian, every time he snaps at me, I think of the poor king from Monty Python whose son Herbert/Alice just wanted to .... SING! And that makes me smile, which makes me happy, and then I ...

Lemme OUT!

Our family doctor has his practice in the basement of an old folks' home. I expect he is the "house doctor" for the facility and also sees outside patients.

It had been many years since we had last seen him. Since our last visit, special keypads had been placed at every door between the parking lot and the doctor's office. I guess they've had concerns about senile patients wandering off, so they've taken precautions. There are three such doors. Each of these doors has a slightly different two-digit or three-digit code. On the way into the office, the access code is written on a label pasted near the door.

Leaving is another matter.

To get through the first door, we had to backtrack to the doctor's office and read a posted sign. The second door had a small label. The third door, in the outer vestibule, had a label indicating, "To exit, press." And the code had been removed. Someone had magic-markered a number that looked like either 09 or 04. Someone else had penned in 11.

Eventually, we started doing sequential combinations 01, 02, 03, 04, 05 ... We were plugging away when someone who worked in the building stepped into the vestibule and, with no preamble, said, "It's 12."

"How on earth were we supposed to know that?!" I exclaimed with thinly veiled exasperation.

"Ask someone?"

The only people we could've asked were two locked doors away. Did they think all the patients just KNEW the release code? Guess so.

Zen and the art of parking-lot circumnavigation.

I darned near lost it yesterday. I was stuck in a parking garage that had signage pointing to the conference centre where I had to set up our exhibit, but no actual direct exits to the place. Seriously. There were signs pointing to brick walls and dead ends. What's more, I'd been in that very garage a couple of years earlier, and I KNEW for a fact that it used to have entrances to the conference location.

If you know me, you know that this kind of runaround drives me absolutely batty. Forget road rage; I get frustration rage. When all I want to do is get the job done, all these irritating impediments are like chalk on a chalkboard (a metaphor our grandchildren will likely not understand). Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Finally -- when I was on the verge of tears, for Pete's sake! -- I paused for a millisecond and decided to practice patience. For me, this is a very conscious decision. I didn't expect it to make a difference, but, honest to goodness, it was as if I was a whole different person.

I wondered, do normal people do this all the time? Do they calmly plod on, knowing that anger and frustration will not make one whit of difference at the end of the day? (Except to raise one's blood pressure, cause cancer and generally shorten one's lifespan.) Do they choose to shrug off the frustration and impatience?

Eventually, enveloped in this new sense of resignation, if not calm, I realized that the parking garage I'd remembered was currently under construction and the entrances I'd sought were no longer accessible. I managed to find the solitary access point, after driving circles around downtown Ottawa.

All without having an aneurysm. I call that a "Win."

Wheat, Dairy, and Egg - oh my!

Those three things - to which Katie is intolerant - are found in an ASTONISHING number of food items where you wouldn't expect them. Here are some of the surprising things we've learned:

• Most margarines have whey powder, which is dairy
• Balsamic vinegar (at least the one we have) has caramel, which is made with butter
• Our fish-oil paste (for Omega-3 supplement) has egg in it
• Even dark chocolate (75% cocoa) has whey powder
• Soy sauce typically has wheat by-products such as MSG
• Canola oil is sometimes processed with wheat

And those are just from preparing tonight's dinner.

You'd think that Asian foods would be pretty safe, but the other night she ate sushi and realized (after she'd eaten it) that the teriyaki sauce, with lots of soy sauce, had wheat, and that the creamy sauce in one dish was mayonnaise -- egg-based (she'd asked several times if it had dairy, thinking it was milk-based).

I think that eliminating one of the three from her diet would be problematic enough; eliminating all three is proving to be quite a challenge.

I am gaining huge appreciation for friends of ours whose children have serious allergies (the kind you drop dead from) to multiple foods. They never eat anything they haven't prepared themselves. Ever. And they don't let their food touch anyone else's. They've opted to home-school both children, and I don't doubt that has saved their lives and health many times.

Katie's lucky; she is only intolerant, not allergic. And she takes oral enzymes so that if she does eat trace amounts of these no-no's, she will be okay. But, selfishly, I am grateful for three things:

1. Katie is an adult and is taking responsibility for her own dietary vigilance;
2. The rest of us seem to have dodged this bullet; and
3. Katie only eats about one dinner a week with us. (Though I love seeing her more often.)

Spilled Milk

"Graceful" is NOT an adjective that is readily applied to me. I've been called elegant (once), which is close, but really only applies when I am sitting still. And not holding a drink. Or not moving my arms anywhere within arm's length of a liquid.

Tonight, I picked up a jug of milk from the table, grabbed a few other things and suddenly realized I was oh, so carefully pouring milk all over the placemats. (My dad used to call that "the lazy man's load" and discouraged me from ever using it. With good reason.)

One time, I almost knocked over a colleague's coffee mug, but caught it just in time. I then set it down, further away from my spill-inclined self, and proceeded to almost knock it down again. Said colleague was watching anxiously while all this went on.

On more than one occasion, I've been holding a glass in my hand when, for no explicable reason, I startle as if I'm about to fall over, jerk my arm, and spill the drink. This happens even before I've imbibed, so it's not alcohol-related.

Solid substances are not protected from my klutziness. One Christmas, as I lifted a delicate, heart-shaped, handpainted, blown-glass ornament out of its cocoon of paper, I commented, "I think this is my all-time favourite ornament," as I proceeded to break it to smithereens. All I could do was laugh and tell the kids they should thank their lucky stars it wasn't one of them who had broken it.

[You might think that my own tribulations would give me some degree of compassion when it comes to my kids' clumsiness. Mostly that is true, but occasionally I am a bad mommy and I forget.]

I can laugh about it now, but when I was a kid it could get a little rough. Especially since I was second-youngest of seven children, and we all know how older siblings like to razz the younger ones.

One night at dinner, after many nights of my mother uttering, "Not AGAIN!" when I knocked over my milk, I did it again. Everyone (except me) just roared with laughter at the predictability of it. But I cried.

Yes, I cried over spilled milk.

My dad, however, stopped laughing, picked me up and carried me into the living room. He wasn't angry. He just held me until I stopped crying. I can't remember what - if anything - he said, but it is one of my fondest childhood memories.

So I didn't cry over my spill tonight, but I did remember my dad, who died more than 20 years ago, and I cried, just a little, over him. Those kind of tears are worth crying.