David Attenborough, Junior

The Big Yam has lately been obsessed with watching episodes of that old BBC Series, Blue Planet on Netflix.  It's his go-to, and we're willing to indulge him (during his allotted TV/iPad time, of course - i.e., only on weekends) because the worst thing that happens is he's learning a s**t tonne about rando ocean creatures.  As in the video below, where he recites a little lecture on the migration habits of Atlantic lobsters, which he has pulled word for word from the series.  He's also watched so much of it, that he's picked up little David Attenborough-isms, which you can hear in the way he says stuff like "Atlantic lobster" in a stuffy, Brit voice.

"The increasing warmth is the cue for an Atlantic lobster to start on a long journey.  She spent the winter 250 meters down, far beyond the reach of the storms.  But, it was cold down there, and now she needs to find warmer water, so she's marching towards the shallows.  They however, are 150 kilometres away.  After a month of walking, she finally arrives at her favorite sandbank."  

Other choice Blue Planet-derived Big Yam funnies: he's been going around talking about how "blue whales don't have butts!" "crabs don't have butts!" but his most consistent assertion in his treatise on the existence of butt-less sea creatures has been "lobsters don't have butts!"  Cue to the other night, when he was nattering on about lobsters not having butts, lets out a GIANT fart, gives some side-eye, smirks, and says, "I guess lobsters DO have butts."  

We're a little unsure how to mediate his absorption of the amoral vicissitudes of underwater life.  He's watching a lot of carnal violence and coitus (shrimp and coral coitus, but still) and we're not sure whether it should be addressed.  Last night, he was watching a segment where an orca is shown in stunning slow-motion detail, eating a grey whale baby (technically known as a "calf" - we are ALL LEARNING THINGS).    In a direct parroting of David Attenborough's narration (though far removed from DA's sombre tone), the Big Yam said, "The killer whale has gotten its prize!" The Dotytron tried to insert some empathy for the plight of the grey whale baby, "Yes, but the killer whale is eating the grey whale calf.  It's dead now." The Big Yam: "The grey whale did not get its prize."  LOL.

Low key times at Casa Dotytron & Lagerfeld high this weekend.  Our friend A is visiting from NYC so the Dotytron went to his show on Friday night, chilled with him again on Saturday, and then we had our friends B & G over on Saturday night for dinner.  Sunday I took the Big Yam with me out and about while the Dotytron treated Momma D to her birthday present  - which was a special breakfast with the babies followed by watching a week's worth of Coronation Street with her.  The Big Yam and I had a pretty fun day - we helped do the Earth Day clean-up at our local park, we went to swimming lessons (where he was a giant pill and I had to be stern with him while all the other kids in the change room averted their eyes and cowered in fear), then we rode the rails (streetcar and subway) to do some errands downtown.  

The wind rustling in the background and the eerie creak of the swings, in addition to the babies (save for the Quincess' last-minute animation) disaffected demeanour is so funny to me.  It's like a Terrence Malick film.

The Quincess is a mischievous little Bonobo monkey.  Periodically, when we leave the Wonder Twins to do their baby scrum on the floor and run wild while we're in the kitchen cooking or something, we'll hear Lindsay unleash a very girlish, high-pitched wail/scream, which generally means that the Quincess has back-arched his way over to Lindsay and ripped the toy he was playing with out of his hands.  It's so funny because Lindsay is so much bigger than Quincess, but somehow, Quincess is surprisingly strong and Lindsay's always getting owned.  Lindsay also has a very classic "dismayed" face, that's kind of like classic exaggerated clown, which makes his anguish all the more laughable.  Then Quincess will give us a very bland, serious, look and basically, the long and short of it is: I could watch the Wonder Twins show all day.

I've all but finalized the haggling for the appliances for the kitchen and have almost finished winnowing down the haggling for the bathroom/kitchen fixtures.  I realize I'm not being very strategic about the process.  I'm not viewing Lil' Ugmo with the jaundiced eye of someone who only sees their house as an asset.  I doubt that future potential buyers would care as much about a 36" Wolf range, but I've lived SO LONG without a proper gas stove and I am not planning on moving in the next, say, 10 years, so I'm going to TREAT MYSELF.  My hot dog and KD game (which is going to be most of what Friday Night Takeout Night will consist of come 3-kids-in-childcare times in September) is going to be NEXT LEVEL.  

I will say it has been nice to sit and stew over a kitchen/bath remodel for the almost-five-years we've been living here.  My tastes have changed over that time frame and I've lived in the house and have a better vision of what I want Lil' Ugmo's best self to be.  A friend was curious about what the original bathroom sink was going to be.  For those of you with the coin to spend, I would encourage you to get the Duravit Vero:

My preciousssssss.

With some brass fixtures like this picture?  GET OUTTA HERE.

So beautiful.  Yeah, I get it.  It's a f**king sink.  But like the our Paleolithic ancestors in the caves of Lascaux, I believe that your home should be beautiful.  A space that reflects you.  Listen, we are all stardust, so why not make our brief time in the corporeal realm one in which we spit our Sensodyne toothpaste into a beautiful wall-mounted sink with brass fixtures?  

Speaking of being stardust, You Are Stardust is a recent picture book that we borrowed from the library, one that I consider worth owning.  Canadian made, beautifully illustrated with wonderfully tactile DIORAMAS, this book talks about how we are all connected by our stardust ancestry.  It's beautiful, poetic, and inspires the reader to situate themselves on a continuum that encompasses dinosaurs, pollen, our oceanic roots, and our future in the stars.  The cadence of the text is thought provoking, informative, and rhythmically comforting.  I highly recommend.  

Last night I took Dr. Rei out for her birthday.  My friend B's restaurant, Porzia, does a Monday $33 prix fixe that is pretty good value and a whole heap of food.  You each get an appetizer, then you share a pasta, and you each get a main.  Half priced bottles of wine, too, although we didn't avail ourselves of that.  We also went a bit buck and ordered an extra vegetable dish, and a hamachi crudo (as I've said before, and I'll undoubtedly say again, I love me a crudo).  It was A LOT of food.  But it was delicious.  My friend B is, as Dr. Rei so eloquently put it, a bit of a babe show:

He's always been super-nice, decent, and has good taste in 'chunes.  Nuff said.  Hard to find in the cooking world, which runs thick with weirdos, pumped up machismo, and small minds (more often than not, that dizzying cocktail in one person).  Also, total babeshow.  So is his wife.  

I didn't take any photos (for once), because I was too busy catching up with one of my favorite people in the world.

Fin.

Playing Favorites

Me to the Big Yam: "Do you have a favorite baby brother?"
Big Yam: "Yes. Lenny.  I love Lenny."
Me: "You mean you don't love Quincess?"
BY: "No. I don't love him. I love Lenny."
Me: "Awww, you're making Quincess sad!"
BY: "I don't love him.  I love Lenny."
Me: "C'mon!  He's your baby brother.  He loves you so much."
BY, exasperated: "Fine. I love him." (clearly appeasing)

The Big Yam has been full of bon mots lately.  In order to get us to stay in his room longer at bedtime, we've been getting really plaintive, "Pleeeease?  Please, Mama?  It would make me so happy.  Just one more minute, pleeeease?"  The other day, we watched a documentary about the complete overhaul of the New Orleans school system in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which saw the failing public school system switched over primarily to charter schools.  One of the principals of a charter school made an assertion that I support.  That is, if you set a high bar of excellence and establish excellence as your de facto expectation, children will rise to meet it.  Setting the bar low is my nemesis.  Anyway, I started getting panicky about us being too "soft" on the Big Yam and succumbing to the namby pamby, indulgent, everyone-gets-a-prize-for-showing-up school of parenting that's so prevalent nowadays, so I said to the Big Yam: "You're going to university!"  He immediately looked up from the iPad (where he's been obsessed with a deep ocean episode of Blue Planet lately), and said, "No I'm not!"  The Dotytron laughed, and I started inwardly freaking out a bit.  "YES. YOU. ARE."  The Big Yam replied, wailing, "I thought I was going to kindergarten!!!"  LOL!

Aside: a 3.5 year old who is already working on a David Attenborough impression is pretty hilarious.

I went to the drop-in centre with the babies yesterday and because this drop-in centre doesn't insist on shoes off, I bring a big blanket to put the babies on in the baby area, to protect them from people tracking all their gross outdoor shoe detritus all over the baby mats.  This old grandma walks in, and STOMPS in her winter boots all over the blanket as I'm inwardly doing a slow motion, "Nooooooooooooooo!" and frantically trying to gather the blanket out of her way.  It made me physically recoil.  WHITE PEOPLE ARE THE WORST FOR THIS!  I will never understand why they think it's totally okay to wear their shoes inside, ON CARPET, especially when they know that there will be babies mashing their faces into the floor and gumming up all the dirt, dog poop, and who knows what else in that same area.  Meanwhile, white people are the first to freak out about whether their pork is cooked enough, but think it's okay to literally track s**t into the house. End Russell Peters-style rant.  Ha.

The weekend was pretty chill.  We ordered from the newly opened Mother's Dumplings on the Danforth for Friday night take out night.  I dunno.  I think the dumplings are pretty overpriced and were mediocre at best.  Everything was just lacking that certain finesse and delicacy that I've come to expect from places in the 'burbs.  I went to see the Veronica Mars movie which was DEEPLY satisfying.  I had been really worried that based on the vitriolic fan reaction to the much-maligned third season, series creator Rob Thomas was going to play the "auteur" card and try to continue along the path out of some misguided sense that he knew better than the fans.  10 years is a long time to let things fester, especially when your baby project gets cancelled.  However, I was pleasantly surprised in that he delivered a movie for the fans.  Seeing as how it was fan-funded, I could see that being a savvy business strategy, but it does call into question the whole process of crowd-funded projects.  If your shareholders are rabid fans, then what leeway do you have to tell the story you want to tell, as the creator?  All that being said, the movie was like a quality beefed up episode, and it was super fun to watch in a theatre filled with 'heads.  All the old favorites were trotted out and my only regret is that we didn't get to spend more time with some of them.   Kristen Bell must have shot the movie shortly after giving birth, because she clearly has giant breastfeeding cans.

At dinner with JJ and S, JJ mentioned how her sister-in-law had to go down to her (grade 6) kid's school at lunch, to sign him out so that he could go on a "date" and take a girl off school property to eat.  JJ asked me if I would ever do that, and I can say, unequivocally, without any fear of back-peddling at a future date, HELLS, NO.  Uh, seriously?  Since when would a kid of mine have time to be thinking of romantic relationships?  In between piano lessons, swimming lessons, junior astrophysicist school, Chinese school, and generally fostering a thoughtful, reflexive, and critical worldview, my boys aren't going to have time for romantic pursuits.  That kind of dreck leads to your kid being a fedora-wearing, low-achieving, slacker.  Look at my parents!  They severely limited my opportunities for social engagement and look how well we all turned out!  Am I socially stunted?  No!  If anything, my social skills are off the chain!  Why?  Because rather than exercising them in the no-holds-barred arena of ACTUAL social interactions with my so-called "peers", I was able to injest and assimilate idealized versions in all the books I read as a kid.

I recently finished Guy Delisle's graphic novel, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City.  It's a classic Delisle travelogue/memoir about the year he spent in Jerusalem with his partner (who was stationed there in her work with Doctors Without Borders), and their two young children, from 2008-2009.  He encounters many instances of Israeli-Palestinian conflict and while he doesn't side openly with the Palestinians, the depictions of some of the actions of the settlers in the Jewish settlements and the injustices and power wielded by the Israeli government in the checkpoints limiting movement by Palestinians certainly does make you, the reader, deeply sympathetic to the Palestinian situation.  Overall, I really enjoyed this book.  It helped to make me more informed of an area of the world which occupies a great deal of headline/news space, but about which I didn't know very much of depth.

As I read so many children's picture books, I'm going to start reviewing some of those here too, for those of you who have little ankle biters of your own, or are looking for good books to buy for your friends/relatives who do.

Monster, Don't Eat Me! By Carl Norac and illustrated by Carll Cneut.  Apparently this author-illustrator duo are Belgian, and all I can say about that is...it makes a lot of sense.  This was a Big Yam library grab.  As I've mentioned, he's starting to be more afraid of the dark and is obviously going through some monster-scary-things-that-go-bump-in-the-night developmental stuff at the moment.  Alex, a little pig, is caught snacking between meals and is chastised by his mother.  On his way to wash up, he gets nabbed by a monster.  Who should kids fear?  The monster?  Do all monsters have mamas?  The story is whimsical and the drawings are beautifully detailed and fantastical, with shades of the dream-like world of Chagall, but rendered in precise line and autumnal tones.  

There are beautiful, odd, hidden characters and details on every page.  It's like Cirque du Soleil but way less grating.  I loved this.

Jon Klassen is pretty well-known in the children's book world.  He's won at least one Caldecott, if not more, and you will generally recognize his work (he does illustrations for other people's stories, in addition to his own work as author/illustrator), by the very modern, naive, flat, and sly looking animal characters that populate them.  This is a book about a bear's search for his hat, and the tricky woodland creature who made off with it.  

To me, Klassen's work generally falls in the category of "the books you want your kids to like, versus the books they actually do like."  There's something a little sly, deadpan, and a shade dark about them that flies over the kid's head.  The humour definitely speaks more to adults, or at least kids who have been weaned on some kind of sardonic pop culture content that will give them the tools to pick up on the jokes.  I love the visual style though, so while this isn't a huge hit with the Yam at the moment, I'm hoping that it will be some day.

Video of the Quincess doing his inverted inchworm crawl.  Accessorized with a bonus knitted toque stuck to his helmet.  

St. Paddy's meal of oven-baked mustard & brown sugar crusted corned beef, with sautéed cabbage, honeyed carrots, and champ

Last night's dinner of braised barley & kale with eggs & grated parm

Sour cream peach pie

Fin.