Social Reproduction...

Or, the struggle is (semi) real.

Or, on raising feral boys.

Oh, hey. How's by you? Remember me?  **I** don't.  I feel no shame in saying that the last two week's have ROCKED me.  And you know what?  It's 10pm on a Friday night.  I stayed late at work to sort my emails, get up to speed on files that I had been neglecting, made a task list for next week, and otherwise, set myself up for success.  Came home, ate a healthy dinner, banged off a batch of Thomas Keller Oreos.  Put the kids down to bed with minimal fuss.  Did a long stretch while listening to a podcast (this one, if you're interested, which I kind of adore), had an even longer epsom salt bath while catching up on my Book Club reading, and I'm listening to the Anderson .Paak album in preparation for tomorrow night's show while catching up on my online shopping and getting ready to blow the dust off my keyboard and do some serious, processing, practice writing in the form of a blog post...WHEN A GIANT FUZZY BUGGY (I think they're called house centipedes?) just scurried down my shoulder and arm and disappeared into the couch crevices.

LIKE, REALLY.

I get it, universe, I'm f**king done.

First days. A wave of shiny, scrubbed, beaming kid faces junking up my FB feed and I'm yelling at all my kids in an increasingly frenzied tenor: "HURRY UP WE'RE GOING TO BE LATE" and I made a commitment to taking the Big Yam to school for his first day of grade 1, even though my manager was kind of being not chill about it when I gave her the head's up on Friday before the long weekend.

Grade 1 is a big deal.  They go from being in the idyllic world (Songs of Innocence) of the kindergarten playground/pen...separate recesses, separate lunches...to the gen pop (Songs of Experience).  The yard is BIG.  EVERYONE is there.  The first day was chaotic.  A teeming mass of confusion and scared looks.  And I couldn't even watch him go in.  I had to leave him there as soon as I found his teacher and hop on my bike and haul a** to work, because...I don't even know why.  Because I needed to be reminded that leaning in is hard?  Because I sadistically wanted to carry with me all the day the memory of his little clueless face in that gongshow sea of heightened emotions?  No wait, it's because I had to work on an RFP for procurement.  Right.  Of course.

I mean, he was fine.  I didn't get my first day photo.  The world didn't end.  Mom guilt is real.  And look, the Dotytron is ONIT.  You know that package of about 29 different forms that comes home on the first day?  Lice checks and snack programs and media releases and codes of conducts and classroom procedures and school procedures and signing up for a million different ways of being contacted (text message, email, app, phone, passenger pigeon, parchment scroll, cuneiform tablet)...he did it all, bless him.  He packs the lunches, most of the breakfasts, supervises piano lessons, starts dinner, and does most of the homework supervision.  I couldn't do it without him, as evidenced by the fact that last night, when he was at school late because of curriculum night, the entire house dissolved into a mess of uneaten dinners and unorthodox tv-on-a-school-night, and the twins rolling around naked on the back deck in two (!) giant upended bottles of bubble solution, and a whole lot of stern shoutiness (from me, obviously).

Anyway, we collectively got rocked the last two weeks.  Downside to being a professional cottager, I guess?

When we came back from the house in Prince Edward County, we rolled into town, unpacked, started laundry, began the slow process of putting our lives back together, and met my mum at Petit Potato for dinner.  Petit Potato pros: extensive menu of Asian desserts, most of which you don't get outside of Taiwanese snack bar type places; we get 10% off there thanks to my Congee Queen loyalty card; the space is nice.  Petit Potato cons: the non-dessert items are kind of meh - I'd rather go to Phoenix or a dedicated ramen shop for ramen.

People go to Petit Potato because of their "giant toast" which is in fact, the giant-est, rendition of giant toast that I've ever seen.  They pride themselves on this giant, 18" stack of soft, white bread, that has been toasted, the innards scooped out, cut, buttered and toasted to buttery-crunchy-crouton-y perfection and then the whole thing is stacked and slathered with whipped cream and ice cream in various flavour permutations.  They're famous for the mango but I find mango puree cloyingly sweet so we got the Oreo flavour to appease my kids.  Anyway, the Dotytron ordered ramen which was good, but not exemplary and I had the Japanese "omurice" which is Japanese-style English food and consisted of an omelette, wrapped around fried rice, with some kind of protein (in my case, pork tonkotsu) and a slathering of decent (read: from the Glico box) Japanese curry.

My kids needed massive appeasing because after a whopping 15 days away from regular life and "Lord of the Flies days" and general abdication from any semblance of a routine outside of being a beach bum, they got smacked in the face with the "giant toast" of reality sandwiches (I'm quite proud of what I did there).  I remember when we were sharing with Momma D and Ehdmo, at one point, as the twins chased each other in endless circles around the main floor of the country house, screaming at the top of their lungs, Momma D turned to me and said, exasperated, "IT. IS. QUIET. TIME. THEY SHOULD BE QUIET RIGHT NOW." And I was like, "IF I COULD MAKE THEM BE QUIET, BELIEVE ME, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS PURE AND GOOD IN THE WORLD, I WOULD."  (except not quite like that).

Later, when the Roomie and the rest of the gang had joined us, there was a moment when she came down and was super-freaked out at how hard the twins were hitting each other and wrasslin': "It just seems like they're being very rough with each other.  Is it normal for them to slap each other?"  Now, I know the Roomie.  She's a sweet, classic hippie.  I get that.  I really do.  But I ALSO get that I felt incredibly judged by this perception of my children as violent.

I carried that with me for quite a few days.  And it all came to a head at Petit Potato.  The kids were fractious and non compliant.  The food took too long and we ordered the wrong things.  The meal was unpleasant on all counts and all the hissing and threats and hauling stiff bodies out to sit in the car didn't make a lick of difference.

I was done.

And then...and then I sat with it for a few days, and really looked at my kids.  I looked at how sweet the Big Yam is with little ones and how caring and helpful he is.  I looked at the fact that the twins NEVER, EVER (*knock wood*) hit anyone other than each other, and how the majority of their time they're rolling around on the floor wrestling and grunting like a pair of labrador retriever puppies, and I settled on this: the twins are rambunctious kids.  That's who they are.  They have a lot of kinetic energy.  I don't know where it comes from, I don't always know how best to serve it, but I know that this is them, and they will tussle, and they're not unkind and they dish it out to the people they think can take it (each other).  They only very, very rarely hit us, or any adults, really.  They don't hit other kids.  They are two exuberant, slightly wild boys, and I don't know where they came from, but they are ours and we're doing the best we can with them.

Things I want to always remember:

Twin B clumping down the stairs with the iPad, unsanctioned, under his arm, repeating the mantra, "Please say yes, please say yes," which he does sometimes before asking the question he wants the yes, to.

Dr. Rei going into the dining room at the cottage and I overhear her say, "Twin B!  Where did you get that?  Should you be playing with that?" and Twin B replies, "Don't tell my mom. Don't tell my mom. Don't tell my mom."

Twin A doing the entire opening sequence for Sponge Bob Squarepants, complete with growling pirate voice.  Hearing him try to say, "absorbent and yellow and porous is he..." is a gift.

Walking the Big Yam to school and the ridiculous conversations that ensue.  Most of which requires me to say "Uh-huh" "wow" "really?" at appropriate intervals during an interminable Minecraft-related monologue.

Week 3 folks!  We made it!  Stay strong!  I will try to post more regularly.  I have many, many things to share.

Fin.

Postcards...From the Edge

Cottage vacations are life, man.

I'm midway through week 2 of 2 weeks of additional cottaging, over and above that week we spent at the beginning of August with my family.  When you have kids, there is nothing better, vacation wise. We rented a cottage with Dr. Rei and Hanbo and baby Zoony and it was perfect.  It was perfect because they are perfect people and best friends. It was perfect because you never have to worry about haggling over who gets what room at the cottage, or money, or anything that can remotely be a chafe with other people because they are exactly like us and they know how to be and are chill and fair and make things easy.

Things I'm Going to Strive to Always Remember:

 the intonation of how Zoony says "yeah" and "I don't have it"

city slicker sees a beaver dam, loses her G-D mind.

my kids floating in the lake

The Dotytron calling me "Future" every time I donned this sun hat 

 watching my three kids launch themselves off the dock, in Twin B's case, preceded by his own cheer: "Go, Lindsay!" 

Hanbo asking Twin A if he's going to do a cannonball, and Twin A replying, matter-of-factly, "No. My feet are too smoll-uh [small]"

- a blue heron taking off in flight during one of our runs

 this GIANT frog, who was a dead ringer for Michigan J. Frog

- playing Catchphrases and Dutch Blitz
- watching Dr. Rei do a choreographed 90s video dance to Dotyron DJing
- arguing with everyone on the dock about Peter Thiel and his relative goodness/badness
- recording the first episode of my podcast with Dr. Rei...it's a good one guys, it's gonna be our ticket out of this two-bit town
- a visit with some K-W friends
- discovering the Swiss Bear Schnitzel House and Tarts store in Apsley, Ontario
- the terrifying appearance of a bold water snake, our first day at the cottage
- Hanbo riding hard for me learning how to dive
- So. Much. Laughter.
- a week that went by too fast for words

From there we drove from the Haliburton area to Prince Edward County and we're holed up in a house built in the 1820s with wide-planked hardwood floors and exposed beams on the main floor.  We're here with the Dotytron's mum and sister for the first half and then we'll be joined by the Roomie and family, our friend Montréal I, and our friend Pingy.  This house is about a 4 minute drive from North Beach Provincial Park, which is a more chill, low-key version of Sandbanks, so we've spent about 4-5 hours of the past two days camped out there.  The glacial sand deposits made thin strips of beach that made a little calm lake one one side of the strip, and angry, wild, Lake Ontario on the other side.  We set up shop on the calm side and let the kids splash in calm waters with the minnows and roll around in the sand dunes.  Today we convinced the kids to go to the wavy side and I watched the Wonder Twins continue to show their general fearlessness and life gusto, by hurling their bodies head-first into 2 foot tall waves (which is almost their height?) and living out a less sexy version of Madonna's "Cherish" video, with about 100000 times more metric tonnes of lake water consumed.

Things I'm Going to Strive to Always Remember:

- the sight of Twin B running towards...anything.  His little legs egg beater out in opposite directions and his heels comes thisclose to touching his bum, like a little drunken leprechaun.
- getting thrashed by the waves and rinsing sand out of every unmentionable nook and cranny
- Twin B in the car, as we got looped around some farms, after taking a wrong turn, "Are we going to a little farm? Is that a little farm?" *pause* "Oooh! I see a little farm!  I see a little farm dere!"  Twin B's stream of consciousness and his little exaggerated, "ooh!" and exhalations of surprise and joy, are so endearing. That kid is basically like a giant St. Bernard in human form.
- Momma D doing her obligatory small-town bakery run and coming back with half the things in a store.  There's nothing Momma D loves more than a small-town bakery.
- playing games with my outlaw sis and Dotytron, laughing at all kinds of in-jokes
- getting an annotated close-listen of Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill, courtesy of my outlaw sis
- Twin A's "bobs" in the water.  He knocks his head back, pauses for a millisecond, and then throws his whole face into the water with gusto.  He also has a way of pronouncing the o-sound in words like "bob" that makes him sound so funny...almost like a Jersey boy.
- my nature boy kids. Never wearing shoes, if we'll allow it.  And the shoes are the thin edge of the wedge. If they had their druthers, they'd be naked running around and tackling each other all the time. They are rambunctious, feral, wild boys...especially the Wonder Twins.  They do best allowed to just express that side of themselves, much to the chagrin of most adults.

I'm so grateful for this opportunity to give them these memories.  Of seeing so much of the beauty of this province. To be in nature and to glory in being wild and dirty and unkempt and unstructured. I love the rhythm of packing coolers and dragging deconstructed loose lunches to the dock and back.  I love watching the circuit of bodies in and out of puddle jumpers and the lake.  Teeth chattering and hooded towels stretched out like capes or wings, the sound of fat, flat feet slapping the worn wood of a dock, the scrape of shovels in wet sand, the cycle of making and unmaking in double-time.  I loved watching Dr. Rei, Hanbo, the Dotytron and I positively decimate a 1 lb baked brie in about 5 minutes and then push the tray away from us in self-disgust.  I love that my kids will know some of Ontario's provincial parks and be used to hiking trails and camping.  I love that the Big Yam learned how to cast at the Dr. Rei and Hanbo cottage.  In fact, he got so into it that he stepped right off the dock one morning.  I love detaching from social media and spotty internet coverage and shedding the layers of caring.  I love this all.

Fin.

I Love...

...napping in a screened porch, hazily hearing the buzz of bugs that want in, but can't.

...putting on a pair of dry underwear after a full 8-hour day in a bathing suit.  Really, that feel of dry underwear hitting your nethers is a golden gift.

...long canoe rides with the Dotytron, exploring a lake's nooks and crannies. We've been doing it for so long...I think the end of our second year together we went up to his family cottage for the first time.  No lake will ever be as magical as that one.  The sun burning the mist off an abandoned beaver dam we happened upon; drifting into a mess of lily pads and catching glimpse of a 1 1/2 foot shell of a turtle disappearing beneath the canoe; bobbing beside a family of loons; hearing the reedy scrape of grasses against the canoe hull as we pass through a cathedral of fallen birches; watching a blue heron take flight off a rock; pretend-buying cottages.  Healey lake is filled with so many fingers and inlets and bays - I loved that time we spent there with the Dotytron's mum and dad and sister, before we had kids, when we were still kids, pretending at being grown.

...canoeing with my kids now.  Perfunctory canoe rides punctuated with constant sharp admonishments to the twins (mostly Lenny) to STOP LEANING OVER and to PLEASE SIT STILL.  Loud canoe rides because my youngest (Lenny) is so pure of heart and without guile and filters and lives in a perpetual present, and therefore, the canoe rides are filled with: "I want to go over dare, wit the grasses. Ooh!  We're going over there!  Are we going over dare?  Are we going over dare...wit the grasses now?" Endless loops of his stream-of-conscious narration, scaring off any potential wildlife for a 5km radius.

...being with my family.  My crazy, loud, contentious, hilarious, inappropriate family.  Building upon nearly 40 years (!) of sibling in-jokes and now inter- and intra-generational jokes and folding in outlaw siblings by marriage.  Seeing my eldest nephew forge a special bond with Twin A (Quincess), the two of them thick as thieves.  Little little Cuz and the Big Yam skulking around pretending to be spies and sitting, heads together, lost in their Minecraft universe.  I have the best family in the world.

...being with my kids.  The twins have a knack for finding frogs?  And we never believe them, and each time, they find a bigger one.  When we went camping we did a gentle hike on this path through an abandoned beaver village (?), and Twin A and Twin B ran up ahead and we saw them crouched over a bridge over a small creek and babbling away: "We found a frog!" The Dotytron and I were very skeptical and we walked up and sure enough, there was a tiny dark green frog head just popping out of the water.  We showed up at the cottage this week and they immediately ran to the dock and when we checked in on them after unpacking, they were once again crouched with their little butts in the air, peering over the dock and yammering again about a frog, and once again, we were like, "Yeah, whatever, I'm sure it's a rock or something," and we look over and it's a GIANT BULLFROG THE SIZE OF A COW HEART.  LOL!  It's just so funny how these clowns legit can't "find" a giant toy that's right in front of their faces and meanwhile, are frog-spotting savants, and each time we doubt them and the frogs keep getting bigger and bigger.

...playing board games.  Taboo, Catchphrases, Telestrations, Apples to Apples, Pictureka, Guess Who?

...eating a giant baked pasta dinner after a day spent basking in the sun, lazily floating on my back in the water

...floating on my back in the water.  Ears submerged, my hair fanning out in the current, the sky above me, the sound of my breathing filling my ears, buoyant, relaxed...like I'm in a sensory deprivation tank.

...all the good food.  Bags and bags of salty snacks, multiple desserts, big egg-based breakfasts, everyone trying to outdo each other in the cooking department.

...the mostly stupendous people in my life.  My family, my friends, my bff.  I'm in love with all the inspiring, beautiful people I've met and continue to meet, who are all so different but at some level all share the quality of wanting to unravel the universe with me.

...time to read, and write.  Plowing through books. That little death you feel when you get to the last page of a book.  Time to spend thinking about what I want to write, how I want to write.  Time to let the words come to me, the things I want to capture, to reflect, to talk things out with smart people I love.

...being with the Dotytron.  Always.

...turning 37 (!).  Being firmly in the back half of my 30s. Spending my birthday surrounded by people I love, with the sun setting on a gorgeous lake, the smell of outdoors in the air, lazily working on a blog post while various people are splayed on in repose in various parts of this giant house.  Being okay with my age and mostly okay with who I am at this very point in time.  Settling into it.  Feeling myself.  Feeling so much love for the people I know.  Just being in love with it all.

 So basically, the cottage is great guys, is what I'm saying.

Fin.

Nanny up

Let's play catch-up, shall we?  In Lagerfeld news, I am now:

• responsible for an entire family in the Philippines
• preparing for two major job interviews next week (5 person panel, 1.5 hours long)
• trying to extricate myself out of the daily doings of the house after a year of Casa Lagerfeld-Dotytron being my own personal fiefdom
• packing up 5 year's worth of ephemera from the basement, to be stored at Momma D's house
• re-organizing Momma D's basement to prepare it for the graceful acceptance of said ephemera
• making a quilt for my new fav lil' baby in the universe (Dr. Rei had a baby!  He is the cutest chicken in the universe!)
• preparing to go back to work in T minus 22 days
• trying to squeeze the marrow out of these last two weeks of summer

IT'S NOT INSIGNIFICANT, GUYS!

Our nanny started this week, part-time, as part of her introduction period.  She will be full-time as of next week.  The process of hiring a nanny was a little stressful (HUGE UNDERSTATEMENT ALERT!), given that it happened during renovations (more on that later, I've still got post-traumatic stress), and while we were coming off living with my outlaw mom.  Unlike the adage, you really CAN'T go home again.  Living in someone else's home, while they're there, for an extended period of time (we were there for four weeks), with three kids, under any circumstance is going to be trying.  Momma D is lovely, but she was sick during that time frame, and I was trying to project manage a major renovation, and you know, I HAVE THREE KIDS AND TWO OF THEM ARE TWIN INFANTS.  There's just no way to be graceful about things in that scenario, especially when your partner is working full-time and DJing a million high school proms and winding down the school year.  

To give you a sense of how desperately we wanted to be home, I moved back in, WITH THREE KID AND TWO OF THEM ARE TWIN INFANTS, into a house that had no working: fridge, stove, shower, and the only running water was in the upstairs bathroom sink.  

I'm going to let that sink in for a moment.

For about a solid week, we were trooping to our neighbour's houses and having showers there (imagine a family of five, showing up bedraggled on your doorstep with towels - reason #58971005200 why I live on the best street in the world) and I was taking our dishes to be washed at their houses.  But we were still HOME.  

Anyway, I signed up for one of those Facebook-for-caregivers sites (Care.com) and put up an add.  Out of the 20+ replies, I ended up finding about 3 people to interview off of there, and 1 person who was referred from this Facebook twins page I'm part of (the awkwardly acronymed TPOMBA - Toronto Parents of Multiple Births Association), and one which was a referral from a nanny I knew and admired from one of our local drop-in centres.

We literally Googled a list of "interview questions for nannies" and I worked a million hours on spreadsheets to figure out what we could afford to pay.  Here is (one of the ways) where having THREE KIDS AND TWO OF THEM ARE TWIN INFANTS screws you:

1) I need to pay for 3 kids in care, 2 of whom are infants (daycares traditionally charge more for infants)

2) The Canadian government offers a child care tax credit of $7000 per child, per calendar year.  This credit reduces the taxable income of the lower wage earner in your family.  Whereas some people can afford to pay their nanny, part-time wages on the books and top up the rest with cash (an arrangement that works out well for both parties), the amount of "on the books" money I have to have each year is $21000 - which is basically someone's minimum wage salary.  

3) Some people can share a nanny, so that their monthly expenses are say, $2000 for childcare but the nanny is taking home $4000 (an arrangement that works out well for all parties), but because I have three kids, no one is going to share with me, so we are on the hook on our own.

Basically, I'm getting owned here.  Because we are two civil servants making middle-class wages, it's not like we have a lot of room, here.  We live in Toronto.  We couldn't offer a lot of money, and then you have to factor in that as an employer, doing everything above board, we have to deduct the employee's portion of CPP, EI, federal/provincial tax, etc. (which hurts the nanny's bottom line) and then we have to pay the employer's portion of all of the above, and quarterly WSIB to boot, which hurts our bottom line.  

To compound matters, we found that a lot of our interviewees or people we contacted liked to discuss a net hourly wage (so, I expect to be making $15/hour after tax, based on a 44 hour work week), which means that I was basically killing myself on the government's payroll deductions online calculator page figuring out different models of gross versus net wages for the nanny, plus what our actual monthly would be, once you factor in our portion of the taxes, etc.  Finally, I talked to a neighbour and he said that he experienced similar when hiring their nanny and finally put his foot down.  It's not the employer's responsibility to figure out your take-home income.  You get offered an hourly and you either accept or you don't.

At the end of the process, we found a lovely woman who has wonderful references (an old high school friend of mine who lives nearby nearly hired her himself) and is sweet and warm and loving and patient and also has her own ideas about childcare practices and believes in open communication.  After hanging with her for a half day yesterday, I truly feel we made the right decision and I hope she stays with us.  

It is a very difficult situation when you hire a nanny from the Philippines.  Our nanny has an 11 year old son who she hasn't lived with since he was one and a half.  ONE AND A HALF.  Instead, she has spent the past ten years looking after other people's kids.  She hasn't been able to afford to go back home more than 3 times in that span.  The Dotytron and I are committed to making it so that we can buy her a plane ticket home every year, if not every other year.  

One of the things we could offer that we thought would be a plus in our negotiations with prospective nannies was the fact that we could do a tonne of paid time off, with the Dotytron's teaching schedule.  So we offered 3 weeks paid vacation and a week of paid sick days, with more paid vacation available if they were willing to take that time during the summer when the Dotytron is off, to offset our slightly lower wages.  In our experience, nannies from the Philippines were less interested in time off.

Our nanny is also supporting her husband and her aging parents and has no siblings.  Her elder sister passed away in a car crash so she's also responsible for her sister's 4 kids.  SO OBVIOUSLY I SLEEP WELL AT NIGHT WITH THAT INFORMATION.  I now know a LOT about the consumer price index in the Philippines the Philippine-Canadian exchange rate.  One of the reasons we hired her is because she was looking for employers who would treat her like family.  We really really like her and she lives close by and I want to be able to help her in any way I can.  

 Last week we spent about 4 days at the Executive Director of my work's cottage.  I spent a good portion of those four days screaming, "DON'T. TOUCH. THAT!!!" The cottage is beautiful.  It was built in 1957 and is as charming as you would expect.  It feels like a home and is charming and individual.  It's on a lake that remains shallow for like, 40-50 feet off from the shore, and the cottages are all fronted with sandy beach.  Perfect for the kids (minus inevitable sand consumption).  We had one glorious day of sunshine and then it was rainy and cool, but honestly, our summer has been so bucksauce and filled with stress and socializing that it was nice to be holed up at a cottage with just my immediate family.  We loved it.

 

Finally, big things going in haircut news.

The Quincess has had some unfortunate, wispy, old man, Doc from Back to the Future hair for a while now (see below).  SMckay did some shaping and now he's looking way more legit.

SMckay also gave the Big Yam the same haircut as Sosuke from Ponyo (so, the classic Asian boy haircut) and it's the best.  He looks so freakin' cute!

  

Gotta go and make sure inflation is holding steady in the Philippines.

Fin.

Hiatus

As it turns out, managing a major renovation, moving out, hiring a nanny, and having 3 kids can be a slightly stressful experience.

I'm not gonna lie folks, this reno has beaten me down a bit.  I'm a changed person.  The Little Dynamo has been broken.  More about my reno trauma in a later post.

For now, let me do some catching up.  We spent a glorious week at a rental cottage with Momma D and Ehmdo and it was lovely.  Going to the cottage was adding to my stress, initially.  It was finally looking like we would have a fully operational kitchen and then - BAM! - we had to pack everyone and everything up and head out of dodge and our house was going to lie fallow with no one around to tie up all the finicky loose ends for a week.  Also, while we were dealing with (to be detailed later) reno issues (the use of the word "issues" is a bit of an understatement) we were ALSO interviewing nannies and the Dotytron was teaching summer school and the Big Yam is home with me 3 days a week instead of just 1 and it was just...a lot.

I just wanted to be home, you know?  Home in my beautiful new kitchen, cooking on my beautiful new stove and using my beautiful new fridge, and chucking the mess in my beautiful new dishwasher.  But no, I had to go to the cottage and oh, did I resent it.  At first.  We drove up, unpacked all our boxes and once the initial frenzy of arrival-at-the-cottage wore off, all of this happened:

 Yes, that is Lindsay unabashedly stuffing his fat face with sand.

That grin kills me (my lower half edited out for unapologetic vanity purposes)

Naked  dockside snacks

Our neighbours tipped us off to a reconditioned steam train that runs in Huntsville so we took the Big Yam on a rainy day.  It was pouring and we were drenched and cold to the bone, but that smile made it so worth it.

Near the tail end of the week, this little nugget realized that you can go swimming naked at the cottage and he ran around with his gitch out thereafter.

The cottage was near-perfect.  On a point of land, so you couldn't see your neighbours.  A giant dock, a sandy entry for the kids, small enough so that the water was warmish but big enough that you got a decent canoe ride out of exploring it.  The fire pit was on a separate stretch of sandy beach and there was a horseshoe pit.  You could tell it was a well-loved and well-maintained family cottage, striking the perfect balance between homey, without you being slapped in the face with family photos of ugly kids you don't know doing cannonballs off the dock, and not being a suburban style McMansion.  It was just the reset I needed.

Things that have been making my summer so far:

- hangs with a very pregnant, due-any-day-now Dr. Rei, where we reminisce about old times (like, the time she wondered what life would be like if Evan Dando's real name was Evan Anne Dando), or older times like back in the raving days when everything I wore was basically a pocket square tied together with dental floss, or when the Dotytron is impersonating Prince and his adroit and uncanny ability to erase his internet footprint: "Police officers are always coming into schools and telling you that everything you put on the internet is forever, but Prince is all like, 'nuh-uh' *click*"

- Micelli Mondays.   Last year, we set up weekly themed movie nights with Lolly and SMcKay that involved a movie and an appropriately themed meal.  These eventually turned into just watching episodes of Who's The Boss.  The 2014 edition has been dubbed "Micelli Mondays" after the proto-feminist protagonist of the series and actually has never taken place on a Monday, but I love alliteration so there.  We've gone swimming and then to Country Style Hungarian and Baker Bots (which was supposed to be tied to a viewing of the Grand Budapest Hotel, but we couldn't squeeze that in).  We have made meatballs and watched Meatballs.  This past week's iteration was a mixed bag featuring: AYCE Japanese, a trip to Pacific Mall for the iPad mini cover pictured below, a random grab bag of fridge-clearing snacks for dinner, and a viewing of Divergent.

- The continued and progressive awesomeness of the Big Yam.  Quotes from this summer:

While watching one of his BBC Blue Planet documentaries - "'Meet the manta ray' means the manta ray eats meat."

After going to the beach, insisting on bringing rocks from the beach home despite the lack of pockets, shoving them into his underwear, and walking bow-legged back to our bikes - "The rocks are talking to me.  They're saying, 'I want hot dogs!'"

"Nana misses us." Me: "Yeah, she does."  BY: "She's saying, 'I wish they would come back so I can poop on them!'" The day after we moved back home after the renovation.

"What's diarrhea?"

- General good times with our friends and family and the neighbours.  The usual good stuff: swimming in the pool, wading pools, beach, backyard, etc.

These are the things that have been sustaining me while I think about the imminent BASEMENT UNDERPIN in our future.  UGH!  My mantra is: "it's cheaper than moving. It's cheaper than moving."  My actual coping mechanism is to ball up all the associated stress of 4 weeks of jackhammers and concrete and more dirt and dust and no laundry into a stress singularity that sits in the pit of my stomach, ignored except when the reality of packing up a whole floor of our house in the next three weeks comes to the fore.

Excuse me, I have to go curl up into a ball and cry silent tears of anxiety.

Fin.

Ups and Downs

Let's start with the good news: we had a fantastic time at the cottage.  All my siblings save C-Hova were represented (he had dental school duties) and our cottage was mad blingin'.  It was only around 2 hours away and we could get there without having to hit the cottage gridlock on the 400.  It had a big swatch of sandy beach, a bunch of water toys, a ground-level giant rec room and a second floor living room so we weren't all on top of each other and we had some place to send the kids, wi-fi, satellite tv, and the water was shallow for at least 75 feet out from the shore, so we could relax without worrying (too much) about the kids drowning.  Here are some snaps:

LOL at how giant the Great Gazoo's feet look in this pic

Elton John?

The arms were my idea

Here's the bad news: we slept in a king sized bed while we were there and got used to it.  I did the number crunching to see how much it would cost us to upgrade to a king (mattress, bed frame, 2 sets of cotton linens, 2 sets of flannel linens, 1 duvet, 2 duvet covers) and it was more than I want to spend at the moment.  Although we could probably sell our current frame for a good price and maybe our mattress too...still not worth it.  It would be a bitter pill for me to swallow to get rid of our frame - it's a mid century beauty with narrow, tapered legs and I haven't seen many of those around.  King sized mid century frames I never see.  So we'll stick with being squished for now.

Good news: first day of school/me home alone seems to have gone really well.  I got the Big Yam to daycare only 15 minutes late, and this is after he slept in like whoa.  The Wonder Twins did their longest sleep stretch yet - from 9:30pm - 4:30am and didn't seem too fussed about me ripping them from their peaceful swaddled slumber and throwing them in their car seats for the daycare ride this morning.  Our daycare provider said that to make it easier for me, I could call her from outside of the house and she would come out and grab the Big Yam so I didn't have to unpack everyone, which is so sweet of her.

At the cottage, the Dotytron and my sister convinced me that I need to keep the Big Yam in daycare full time, so I frantically called J to let her know.  Lucky, because she was interviewing someone this week to fill the other half of what would have been his part-time slot.  I talked to her today and told her that we would pay full-time even though I'll probably only have him in 4 days a week and she is refusing my money so we're in the middle of negotiating.  She's so sweet.  We are so lucky to have her.

Bad news: leading up to the first day of school was kind of fraught.  The Dotytron and I got into a classic Dotytron-Lagerfeld scuffle because he was a bundle of nerves and I was being insensitive to his nervy bundle.  He was on edge last night and I was trying to figure out what City of Toronto programming I should sign up the Big Yam for.  I asked him if he thought basketball or soccer was good and he was being weirdly negative so I got snappy in return.  The Dotytron's point: putting the Big Yam in basketball is a waste of time since he hasn't shown any interest in ball sports.  My point: he hasn't shown any interest because we haven't exposed him and this will give him a chance to try it out.  Let's just say that the argument culminated in me peevishly saying, "If you had YOUR way the only skills he'd learn would be from the Halloween Spooktacular!"  (actual name of Halloween crafting program).  Saying the word "spooktacular" during an argument is its own reward.

Finally rounding out the bad news, the Wonder Twins had a follow-up ultrasound to check up on the cysts in their brains that were first detected when they were in the NICU.  The Great Gazoo had some teeny ones, but Prof. Gantok had some bigger ones.  While we were at the cottage, I got a call from my doctor saying that the Great Gazoo's cysts had disappeared, but that they didn't know about Prof. Gantok's.  I was concerned and then even more so when I came home to find that he had been scheduled for another brain ultrasound.  I didn't know if it was because they didn't get proper images the first time, or if the cysts had gotten bigger.  I called my doctor today and he said that the cysts in Prof. Gantok's brain were still there.  One had either disappeared or couldn't be found, and there was a new one.  The problem with the diagnostics is that ultrasound is an imprecise tool, so the new one could have been there all along, or have just appeared.  The same could be said for the one that "disappeared" - maybe it just wasn't found this time around.  They are in an area of the brain (the ventricles) that have to do with the neurons that coordinate motor skills.  The worst case scenario is that it's periventricular leukomalacia (PVL) - a type of brain injury common in premature infants deprived oxygen to the brain that can cause cerebral palsy, developmental delays, and behavioral issues.  You can find out more (if you are so inclined) from this article here.

Low birth weight (less than 1500g) and mechanically ventilated premature infants born at less than 32 weeks' gestation are at the highest risk for PVL.  The Wonder Twins were both more than 1500g and cleared the 32 week marker (just), but they did have to be mechanically ventilated for a time.  My doctor said that the presence of cysts are just one part of the picture.  He, our paediatrician, and the paediatricians at the neo-natal follow up clinic will also be on the lookout for other things - like low (muscle) tone, if Prof. Gantok favors one side of his body over another, difficulty feeding, etc.  So far, he doesn't show any of those symptoms.

*knock on wood x 1 billion*

SO SUCKS.  We have to just keep hoping for the best.  For right now, he certainly seems like a regular baby.  Although having the talk with the doctor is making me second guess everything.  Like, maybe that's why he looks so scared all the time?  Maybe that's why his eyes are darting around all the time?  Maybe that's why he's needier than his brother?  You can go crazy looking for things to be wrong, especially when you're prone to hypochondriac tendencies like I am.

I'm no doctor, but I can prescribe lots of hugs and kisses and smushes and cheek-eating.

Cutest little turtle, ever.

Chipotle-lime marinated pork (a winner!), zucchini blossom fritters, steamed carrots with mint butter. And the WORST corn I've ever eaten.  We bought it from the Farmer's Market.  I think it was feed corn.  The WORST.

We've gone back to mostly dairy-free, healthy eating since Sunday.  It's felt nice, although I'm ravenous all the time and I miss all the dessert eating at the cottage.  I've been feasting on peaches and nectarines a plenty though.  GAH.  They are SO GOOD RIGHT NOW.  

Fin.