Giving Thanks

First, let's get the money shot out of the way:

Isn't she a beauty?  I got a 20lb bird and it still isn't big enough!  NO BIRD WILL EVER BE BIG ENOUGH!  I obviously need a larger roasting pan.  I want one of those large, short, squarish ones.  The one I have is fine for most roasts and things, but when it comes to feeding my family, where only an 8 rib prime rib will do, and a 20lb bird is the bare minimum you would consider, I need something much, much larger.  

Thanksgiving has taken on a whole new dimension in the last five years.  As you've been hearing me trumpet for the past 8 years (!) of this little space, it was already my favorite holiday.  Then, my beautiful, dearest, sweetest BFF married the dearest, sweetest, kindest guy on Thanksgiving weekend and I will remember always being there, so incredibly happy for those two, sing-shouting Africa by Toto at the top of my lungs and the Dotytron giving his best go at dancing with all the Iranian biddies.  Then, a year later, the Big Yam was born, and every year since then his birthday has fallen around Thanksgiving and I am so thankful to have his little butt in my life.  Parenting is a weird thing.  If the mirror that being in a long-term relationship reflects back at you is one of those department store dressing room types (detailed and unflattering enough to show all the bumps and ridges in your bod, but not poorly lit enough so that you can still emerge with a small shred of self-possession and ego intact), then the self you find in the mirror of parenting is one of those illuminated, magnifying mirrors on cosmetic counters.  Every flaw, every pore, every spot, every wrinkle, every errant hair blown up and exposed with the harshest, most flattening light.  I am tested and made better by him every day, even as I enact the patented, Karl Lagerfeld School of Dog-Training/Spirit Breaking style of discipline and coercement that makes up the foundation of my parenting praxis.  

I took last Thursday off from work to take him out on a special day.  Our only goal was to take every kind of TTC imaginable and take a Go Train and end up at Dr. Rei's house to visit her and baby A.  We took the Go Train to Long Branch (which is somehow still considered part of Toronto?!  How does that work) and then promptly turned around and headed right back.  He was THRILLED:  

Just so, so, so happy, the entire time.  He was pretty sweet at Dr. Rei's house and most of the weekend.  He remembered his manners, wanted to kiss baby A a bunch of times, and was just so kind, and loving, and curious, and the perfect amount of impish, that it was truly a pleasure hanging with him.  

Last year I started the tradition of asking him 20 questions on his birthday.  Here are last year's answers:

1. What is your favorite color?  Blue like my Thomas pajamas
2. What is your favorite toy?  My double decker bus (He made me rephrase the question as: “What’s your favorite vehicle?”
3. What is your favorite thing to eat? Sausage (as he was eating sausage for breakfast)
4. What is your favorite movie? Thomas movie
5. What is your favorite outfit to wear?  Blue shoes
6. What are your favorite animals? Who’s a farmer?The animals in Farmer’s Rick barn and a rooster came and I start to cry.
7. What does Mama do for work? Hmmm...
8. What does Baba do for work? I don’t know
9. What is your favorite book?  I don’t know either.  My favorite book is...play some trains and helicopters and trains and truck
10. What is your favorite thing to do outside? Play Choo Choo
11. Who is your best friend? Mama / Tristan
12. What do you want to be when you grow up?  Here - I want to get beer
13. What's your favorite game to play?  Thomas
14. What's your favorite thing to do with Mama? Nothing.
15. What's your favorite thing to do with Baba?  Play
16. What's your favorite special treat?  chocolate
17. If you could go anywhere, where would you want to go?  Poh Poh (Poh Poh’s house)
18. What makes you happy?  ...
19. What makes you sad?  ...
20. What makes you scared? ...  

And this year's:

1. What is your favorite color?  Blue
2. What is your favorite toy?  The Dragons - the dragon book with the dragon pieces
3. What is your favorite thing to eat? hot dogs and macaroni and pizza
4. What is your favorite movie? The Incredibles
5. What is your favorite outfit to wear?  The cape shirt
6. What are your favorite animals? Elephants
7. What does Mama do for work? You...brush your teeth
8. What does Baba do for work? He...he...he plays music
9. What is your favorite book?  The Incredibles Book
10. What is your favorite thing to do outside? Ride my bike
11. Who is your best friend? Chloe & Indi & Meredith
12. What do you want to be when you grow up?  Ummm...a superhero
13. What's your favorite game to play?  Tag
14. What's your favorite thing to do with Mama? Go to Auntie Rei’s house on a...on a...go on a Go train
15. What's your favorite thing to do with Baba?  Have a walk
16. What's your favorite special treat?  chocolate
17. If you could go anywhere, where would you want to go?  To the CNE
18. What makes you happy?  When you don’t listen
19. What makes you sad?  When you say I can’t
20. What makes you scared?  Um...when it’s dark in caves.

I think some of the questions will have to change with time (like, eventually he'll figure out what I do for a living, besides brushing my teeth in preparation for work).  But he's becoming such a capable, responsible, sentient little person.  We bought a small jar of that soy-butter fake peanut butter stuff which is what he gets for school.  This morning he asked the Dotytron if he could have "some of the large parcel of peanut butter" (our regular peanut butter is in a Costco-sized jar).  I love that I co-created a 4 year old who uses the word "parcel"!  He also generally has his shiz together.  When the Dotytron was stressing about his readiness to start JK, he polled the other teachers in his school and they were like, "Does he eat his lunch? Does he bring back his lunch containers?  Yes?  He's golden!"  He puts away his dishes in the dishwasher, wipes up his place mat, is fairly responsible for feeding the cats and will get himself dressed and brush his teeth.  We are now working on bed-making and laundry sorting.

We continued the celebration on the actual day of his birthday by having dinner with Momma D, where he was thoroughly spoiled with very thoughtful, considerate, enriching gifts.  He continued to impress me by giving unprompted thank yous for every compliment, every birthday wish.  We decamped to Momma D's house all day because our basement, which was sold as "finished" but was actually a "little shop of horrors," was being demo'd and stripped down to the concrete.  

Pro tip: when you are hosting the next day and your basement doesn't have a door and is essentially open to the rest of the space, it might not be a good idea to do your demo the day before.  The "finish" was actually keeping a lock down on this unholy, dank, disgusting smell that I've only encountered in long-occupied, seldom-aired Hong Kong apartments occupied by people with questionable hygiene.  A tumid funk, if you will, that then INFECTED OUR WHOLE HOUSE.  It was kind of stressful.

We gave the place a proper cleaning and aired out the main floor and ran the exhaust and thankfully, by the time the bird was in the oven, the smell of Thanksgiving had triumphed over unwashed neglect.  IT WAS A THANKSGIVING MIRACLE!  

The visit with my sister and her family and my littlest bro was awesome.  I LOVED cooking Thanksgiving dinner in my new kitchen.  It was so effortless!  It was so painless!  It was so easy to clean up!  It made me excited for the arrival of the basement, when we'll have a whole other space where we could throw the kids down there and spread out some more.  

A shot from the Brickworks last Saturday.  We are planning on being giant nerds this weekend and going for a walk in the Don Valley and taking in the fall colours.

On our visit with Dr. Rei, we stopped by a new patisserie, The Tempered Room, in Parkdale.  I got a selection of pastries, and had a snacky, brioche type thing there.  The brioche was good, the pastries were kind of the grossest.  Clockwise from the top left we have: pumpkin tart, pomme caramel, and an eclair with nutella.  First of all: they were hella expensive, which I can accept, if the flavours are out of this world.  They were very, very small.  The nutella banana eclair was the best of the lot, but the other two were too fussy.  Each one had a flavour element that was put there I think to be progressive, but just ended up not marrying well with the overall flavour profile.  Like, the pumpkin tart had a truffled cream that was so overwhelmingly truffle (and keep in mind, I'm not a person who goes banana for truffle flavour), that it veered into a savoury dish, and one with a paste-y, almost mealy texture.  The apple thing was very pretty, but the classic combination of apple and caramel was totally thrown off by the black and white sesame seeds, which added an almost acrid, coffee-like bitterness to the dish.  I LOVE toasted sesame seed flavours, but I think that warm, roasted taste is best offset with classic, mild flavours (cream, vanilla).  The acidity of the apple didn't match well.  I wouldn't necessarily go back to that place.  

My pumpkin pie, which I've realized needs some tweaking.  It was considerably elevated by a drizzle of salted caramel sauce.

We've been eating well this week - Tuesday had my ex-bf over for dinner and had matzoh ball soup and these spinach-artichoke melts.  Wednesday we had this kale, squash, and bacon risotto.  Last night was my irie pumpkin stew with Jamaican-style rice'n'peas.

Tonight, I had the infinite wisdom to prep a pan of homemade nanaimo bars and am stupid excited for Swiss Chalet delivery.  It's the little things, folks.

Fin.

No Dog Left Behind

I'm gradually emerging from my plague ridden state.  Monday was the first day that I've actually felt well again, after a fairly intense 3 week illness.  I spent most of the week previous in a sickness induced, didn't-get-the-job-and-feeling-surprisingly-crushed-about-it mind funk, emerging from my stupor to obsessively refresh the Weather Network site and track the satellite imagery because we were hosting TWELVE (12!!!) kids for the Big Yam's dinner and a movie birthday party.

It was intense.  Some people didn't RSVP and of course I didn't chase them because quite frankly, I was hoping they forgot and I didn't want to hear "oh yes, actually we ARE coming!" I was already getting stomach knots thinking about all those f**kers in my house.  We kept it very, very simple.  We showed Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs outside on the deck on a projection screen and prefaced that with a dinner (also outside) of hot dogs and Kraft Dinner with a fruit tray and a veggie tray.  Veggie straws, a bowl of gummy bears (as a shout out to the movie), and the piece de resistance, I made these cupcakes that look like spaghetti and meatballs (round tip yellow-tinted swiss meringue buttercream with a Fererro Rocher "meatball" dipped in a strawberry sauce and plopped on top).    The weather was being a pain and it kept threatening to rain all day, interspersed with glorious moments of sunshine.  We didn't know how to call it and finally just hoped for the best.  All the parents sent their kids with winter gear and sleeping bags and in the end, the rain held off and it was a lovely (albeit a tad cold) few hours outside.  One kid plaintively asked me at one point, "When do we get to go inside?" and I was like, "You don't.  This is an outside party."  LOL!  I'm a monster.

One kid was also being a whinge and finally I just said, "Do you want to go home?" and she said yes, so I just packed her up and walked her home.  For a few seconds it looked like she was waffling but I didn't give her a chance to change her mind.  I don't have the patience for that, man (which is why I'm not a teacher).  We served popcorn and lit an inaugural fire in our outdoor fire pit (read: corner of our concrete pad that we bricked in with leftover/found bricks).  In the end, my vision of a bunch of kids all snuggled up and giggling at the antics of Flint Lockwood and co. actually measured up to the reality, but not without some fraught moments.  It looked like things were going FUBAR when the party first started and all the kids were riled up and screaming like banshees in the backyard and I was frantically blowing up balloons to keep up with demand.

The weekend prior we had both my nephews sleep over while the rest of my siblings went to the annual hospital fundraising gala my mom's organization throws.  Little Ze, the older one, balked at eating one of my test-run cupcakes because he said it "tastes like pasta" and of course, the Big Yam picked it up and refused to eat the cupcakes I made for the party.  They also got properly country mouse-city mouse'd because our charming neighbours had one of their classic blow outs that somehow seemingly inevitably ends in a quasi psychotic episode with someone screaming obscenities in the street at an ungodly hour.  The Dotytron went to the bathroom and walked by the Big Yam's room to find my two nephews, wide awake, lights on, anxious and worried and unable to sleep.  Welcome to the big city, boys!  

I met with Academic Book Club last week.  I love those women, but we have very, very different value systems and we have very, very different cultural references some times.  JJ mentioned that she was shocked about the revelation shaking up the food blogging world that the authors of the blog, "Thug Kitchen" turned out to be white.  Thug Kitchen won Saveur Magazine's best new food blog of 2013 award.  I'm not sure why.  I've linked the blog so you should read some entries.  I've read lots of pieces about the racism implicit in invoking the use of the word "thug" in the blog title and the tone of the writing (Gawker, Jezebel), but honestly, it's fascinating to me because ALL YOU HAVE TO READ IS ONE ENTRY AND YOU COULD DEDUCE THAT IT'S NOT A "THUG" (READ: BLACK) PERSON WRITING THIS VEGAN FOOD BLOG.  The whole "the authors are white!" reveal is about 15 billion degrees less surprising than the most mundane reveal on Scandal (a show the Dotytron and I both love).  Like, because the author swears (in the clunkiest, most inelegant way imaginable - you can tell it's an affectation and doesn't come from someone who drops f-bombs as part of every day speech), it's "urban"?  There's no slang, the tone is all off, and yet, the fact that people bought in says so much to me about the privileged, rarified world of food writing and foodie culture.  James Oseland as an arbiter of urban culture?  I think not.  

Anyway, those ladies are lovely but very different from I.  A few weeks ago I got to parachute in as a ringer to the Dotytron's Record Club and guys, RECORD CLUB IS SO FUN.  It's a bit of a bro-down, so I'm not sure I'd be welcome to join (they've also curated the guest list to the nth degree because the vibe is super important to them), but, as an example, the theme was jungle music and the guys came over and we played records and DJ'd and then went to a club and danced until almost 3am. By comparison, at Academic Book Club, it's shaking it up when we meet at a restaurant (this time we met at District Oven, which is a pretty terrible Middle-Eastern-ish restaurant where they don't salt the house-made pita, which is a criminal offense, in my books) instead of at someone's house where we talk about our kids and pick at a desultory spread of baby carrots and grapes and Carr's water crackers, which are my Platonian ideal of a disgusting cracker I want to get as far away from as possible.

As this post has already ventured into potpourri category, my proposed tattoo is taking shape.  A few weeks ago, while spearing the last lonely, cold, congealed hot dog off a plate, I said to the Dotytron, "No dog left behind, is what I always say," and then said, "I should get that as my tattoo!"  Imagine it, a cute, 1950s style hot dog with "No dog left behind" underneath?  That's such a good motto, isn't it?  Not only insofar as it pertains to hot dogs, but also as a motto for how you deal with friends, family, etc.?  

I'm feeling a bit low, lately.  Not getting the job, when it's an internal competition, and you've been with the organization going on eight years now, is tough, mentally.  I can tell myself that I wasn't the right fit, that it's about being the right person at the right time for the organization, and I can try to pump myself up with so many Sheryl Sandberg platitudes about how your career isn't a ladder, but a jungle gym, etc...but I still fell off the jungle gym.  On my a**, on concrete (this is an old school jungle gym - none of that recycled rubber composite padding here!  I'm having a bit of an existential crisis about it, probably exacerbated by the fact that I'm back at work after 15 months off, and this is my LIFE, ya know?  I'm (presumably) done having kids, so my career is where I'm going to be spending the majority of my time and energy and I'm feeling a bit lost and directionless.  

Other things that don't help: being sick, calorie counting so I can't even take comfort in a pile of empty carbs, getting reacquainted with rush hour TTC streetcars.  

Things that do help: visits with friends, eyelash extensions from SMckay, saying "to hell with it" and buying myself a (cheap) leather purse from ASOS anyway, fall, a long to-watch list on Netflix, slow cooker meals, moving bedtime up for all the kids so that I get an extra half hour of "me" time in front of the TV, with my knitting and quilting in hand, and more time for reading.  These guys:

REMEMBER THESE GUYS?!?  

OK.  Those nerdbombers are such giant nerdbombers.  Look at how clueless and overwhelmed by life they were.  For real. 

This guy's new catch phrase:

He's really trying to make it stick.

Dinners around here, lately:

Hit up Ja Bistro with our Guu crew.  This is the large lobster sashimi platter.  They also served this blowtorched sushi (aburi) which is nice - kind of smoky from the edges getting singed, which offsets the sweetness of the rice and the cool centre of the fish really well.  Overall, I really liked the blowtorched stuff and obviously, a pile of sashimi is always delicious, but I felt like the giant ice platter didn't showcase each piece.  We were so busy gabbing and eating that I didn't get the full 

O-TORO-gasm that you get when the pieces are presented individually, or slowly.  I might go back, but I'm more likely to hit Guu up again.

Shrimp burrito bowl times

Last night's dinner was a sausage, kale, and white bean gratin with crispy torn bread topping and baked delicata and buttercup squash.  I pre-soaked and parboiled some cannellini beans and set the aside.  In a pan, I took about a pound of sausage out of the casing, and browned it, breaking up the chunks with a spoon.  Then I added onions, garlic, a bit of the bean water, and a whole giant head of kale, thinly sliced.  Cooked that down, then stirred in the beans and seasoned with salt and pepper.  I added some apple cider and about 2 ounces of smoked gouda, diced small to the pan, then topped it with bread torn into big chunks and tossed with oil, salt and pepper.  Baked until hot.  It was good, but needed a bit more...maybe some herbs, maybe some lemon zest, maybe some parmesan?  

I have a backlog of a million book and movie reviews.  Stay tuned.

Fin.

  

Alternative School Parents Are The Worst

...but most other parents are also brutal.  You can't convince me otherwise.  Last week we had curriculum night at our school, which is basically an opportunity for the parents to come with the kids and check out their kid's classroom and find out what the overall objectives are for the year.

Our school shares a space with this alternative school, which is filled with 99% entitled white kids who think they are special stars (that's not me being racist, that's a legit observation - lack of diversity in the alternative school has been identified by all parties and they're trying to step up their "recruitment" as a result).  The schools share a principal, who takes great pains at every opportunity to tell you that he's the principal of two very busy, very active schools, the subtext of which is: "don't bother me."  This all means that during his presentation at curriculum night, the alternative school kids were running amok and being loud and he didn't try to have the room in control before starting his short presentation, so you couldn't hear anything and the audience was bananas.  It was a gong-show.  The alternative school is tiny, like maybe a hundred kids, max in total, but their parents are apparently very demanding.  As the Dotytron has astutely noted, why is funding going towards that?!  Why don't we have an autism school, or something equivalent that is desperately needed in the province?  Instead, our alternative school has the kids call their teachers by their first names, and they sit outside a bunch and it's supposed to teach the "whole child" (as opposed to regular school, where they only teach the kid's armpits?)

This is what you learn when you become a parent of a school-aged chld in downtown Toronto: OTHER PARENTS ARE CRAY.  The investment, outrage, and entitlement that people feel engaging with a public system is laughable, almost.  It's where a failure of the imagination, ego, misunderstanding of redistribution and community, and the zero-sum game that is modern, urban, educated elite parenting swirl together in a seething mass of bristling ignorance.  The same women who would stop me during my maternity leave and marvel at the fact that I had the guts to leave the house with a 3 year old and twin infants in tow, are the SAME PEOPLE who expect a teacher to personally shepherd their child to the bathroom, each time they have to go pee, in a class of TWENTY FOUR other students!  Mom who is wigging that the FREE SNACK provided was a yoghurt tube and not whatever the f**k tasteless brick of coconut oil and flax flour you wanted to make, here's a pro tip: ABSTAIN FROM THE FREE SNACK.  Or, better yet, JUNIOR KINDERGARTEN IS OPTIONAL, PULL YOUR KID OUT!  People basically just want to create little private schools without paying a single extra cent.  It's mind-boggling, really.

Here's the seedy underside of this: IT MAKES YOU CRAY, TOO.  Or it does me at any rate.  When you're caught up in a nattering maelstrom of helicopter, attachment-parenting types it's easy to lose your centre and get swept up in madness.  The Dotytron is really good at staying above the fray and putting things in perspective.  Last night after curriculum night he said look, at the end of the day, does the Big Yam feel safe?  Does he feel supported and comfortable?  If those requirements are being met we are lucky in that we can fill the other potential gaps in his education on our own, if need be.  The Big Yam has made a little friend and they are super-cute together:

Also, we have a new principal who is making classic new principal mistakes and kow-towing to the demands of the crazy parents.  I emailed the principal about them losing the Big Yam, because I thought the communication (mainly from the administration) wasn't great.  So I went early late last week to meet with him and the the Big Yam's teacher and he TOTALLY THREW THE TEACHER UNDER THE BUS!  He turned to her during the meeting and was like, "What are YOU going to do so that this doesn't happen again?"  and I was like, "wait, whaaaat?  That s**t ain't right, son."  To me, that's crappy management.  I was there with the express purpose of working WITH them to figure out what we might need to change from an operational standpoint so that you don't lose a kid on the first day, maybe.  I've talked to some teacher friends, and the consensus is that usually what happens in these meetings, is the teacher and the principal work together BEFORE the parent shows up, come up with a plan, and then the principal says during the meeting, "we are going to do x, y, z" and the teacher says, "uh huh" and then boom, it's done.  The way he handled this seriously made me think he was a giant a-hole.  Then, he threw her under the bus AGAIN, privately, when he pulled me into the office and assured me that what she did was unacceptable, and he took it seriously.  I intellectually know what happened.  He thought I was one of those cray helicopter parents and was going to like, sue the school or something.  Uh, no.  I get that it can happen, no biggie.  What I'm less impressed with is you undermining your staff member in front of me and hanging them out to dry.

Is our kindergarten teacher the greatest?  No.  I'm not like, stoked to have her and I don't think I would want the Big Yam in her class next year, if we decide to stay.  But, she hasn't done anything so far that makes me outraged.  She seems kind of checked out, but she's 24 years into her career.  I don't blame her.  I'm certainly not wigging the way one of the other parents is, because her daughter had an accident at recess and so the teacher sent her daughter in with an SK buddy to go get changed in the cubby area, and at the end of the day, her daughter's dirty clothes were strewn in the cubby area.  Mom is all like, "where was the follow through?  Isn't that a safety issue?"  And I'm like, uh, why don't you talk to your kid about putting their dirty clothes back in their bag after?  Do you expect teacher to personally shepherd your kid to get changed?  And what, leave the other 13 kids out front during recess by themselves?  How does that make sense?  Of course, mom felt the need to take that to the principal (?!?)

Anyway, I can't handle that shiz.  When I can, I do the drop off and pick-up (like on my days off, or even on days like today, when I'm home sick), because cray-cray parents would have you believe that that's when you get the "scoop" and "gossip."  But to me, it's not worth it.  My friends who dump their kids at daycare in the morning and then pickup from daycare are blissfully removed from the s**tstorm of crazy and I'd rather be in with them.

In the interests of transparency, I feel like I owe it to you to be truthful and say that after touting the systems we've developed to ease our transition, week 2 was a bit rough.  The Big Yam was crying every day wanting me to take him to school and not understanding that I have to go to work.  Last week I got stuck on public transit for an hour coming home and wasn't prepared and by the time I came home they had all eaten dinner without me.   Last Friday, our nanny called in sick so the Dotytron and I had to do the whole 6am/staredown/decide who is going to bite the bullet thing.  Thankfully, things seem to have settled this week.  I think the Big Yam gets that this is his new reality and seems to be adjusting fine.  He's such a laid back kid.  We are lucky, although I will say that based purely on anecdotal evidence, laid back parents tend to have laid back kids.  One mom of a classmate of the Big Yam's keeps sending histrionic texts about how her anxiety is at "through the roof" levels because teacher has been off sick for the past few days and they've had a couple of different supply teachers in.  Really?  There are some people who have real problems.  Remember that.

I feel like they finally seem like real babies.  The Quincess has bulked up like whoa.

Quincess pose - LOL!

Weeknight dinners: a smoke gouda, potato, bacon, and kale quiche

Shrimp and salmon corn chowder with cheddar sage biscuits

Pot roast & root vegetable mash

Breaded tilapia, homemade tartar sauce, salted heirlooms, and buffalo fried cauliflower, which is AMAZING.

Fin.

We Did It, Ma!

First full day of JK for the Big Yam.  First day back to work for me.  First day where I've only spent 3 of the babies' 11 waking hours with them.  As one would reasonably expect with that number of firsts, the last week went largely smoothly but not without some hiccups.

For example, after dropping the Big Yam off at school and going through the whole "furtively-wiping-tears-off-our-faces" bonding camp with the other JK parents outside in the kindergarten pen, I met up with the Roomie for brunch.  We were in her car on our way when I got a call from my nanny saying she was "concerned" because she had heard an announcement on the PA to the effect of: "Will Master T please go back to his classroom."  She was worried so the Roomie and I turned the car around and headed to the school.  I went into the office, got the attention of the Vice Principal and said, "Um, I heard that there was an announcement made for my son?" And he said, "Oh, are you T's mom?  After music class, he got swept up with the big kids and ended up outside with the big kids during their recess.  Don't worry, we found him very quickly and had all hands on deck looking for him!"  At the time, I was pretty blasé about it and the Roomie and I had a big laugh, but the more I think about it, the more I'm a bit, "WTF?"  How the heck did that happen?  Isn't 75% of the make-up of a primary teacher's day lining kids up, making them hold hands, and counting them?  Later on, after quizzing our nanny, she said she was first twigged to there being an issue when a man I now suspect was the VP came running into the drop-in centre (which is in the school) inquiring if there was a "Master T, in JK" there.  Five minutes later (by her accounting), the announcement was made on the PA.  That's a long time for a kid to go missing!

Later in the week I emailed the principal because I felt like the communication from the school was lacking.  The Big Yam's teacher made a cursory mention of it in passing during the frenzied cattle call that is pick up.  The principal INSTANTLY responded and said he was going over the procedures with the Big Yam's teacher and that he was actually the one who found the Big Yam and it was only a minute, but one minute is a minute too long in his books (I can't believe he wrote those words!) blah blah blah.  

One thing of note that I've experienced since starting this whole "parent-of-a-school-aged-child" thing this year is how the Dotytron's loyalties are weighed disproportionately (in my opinion) towards his fellow teacher brethren (and sistren?)  When I went out and dutifully bought fiendishly expensive lunch containers for the school's "literless lunch" program, I was chastised because the Big Yam couldn't open the leak-proof clasps and that this would now be the "teacher's" responsibility.  I was criticized just this morning because I had the temerity to put the Big Yam in jeans that had a zipper and one of those sliding hook/tab closures because it would make it so much harder for "teacher" when he had to go to the bathroom.  When I balked at buying the Big Yam a pair of sneakers JUST for indoor use at school (my rationale being, why can't he wear his sneakers to school and indoors and then, if it's raining or snowy, then transition them as his indoor shoes?) the Dotytron gave me a hard time and told me that I was being unreasonable and why can't I just follow the school's directives?  

The point being: he's slowly letting slip whose team he's on and he's making an enemy of me.  Haha, just kidding (OR AM I?!?)  When I told him I emailed the principal and that my intention wasn't to get the teacher in trouble, he got all accusatory: "So why didn't you bring it up with the teacher?  Why did you have to escalate things and go straight to the principal?" In my defense, blog readers, my rationale is that this was an operational/management issue.  The communication protocol was really ad-hoc.  If my nanny hadn't been at the school that day, I would have found out at the end of the day, through the teacher's hurried, over-the-shoulder account, which, incidentally, varied substantively from the report of my witness?  Why are the JKs being transitioned from their rotary classes at the same time as the bigger kids?  If it was from music class, why isn't the music teacher responsible?  Who is responsible?  What procedures do they have in place to make sure this doesn't happen again?  At the very least, what can we do to make sure this doesn't happen on a kid's FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, EVER?!?  

Full disclosure: this principal is already on my s**t list, so yeah, and has already made an enemy of me so yeah, I'm going to be looking for his administrative failings and bringing them STRAIGHT TO HIS FRONT DOOR.  The story of how he finds himself so low in my standing is a tale for another day.

The first day at work was invigorating.  I nailed my outfit, unpacked all my shoes, felt good.  A lot of things change but your day to day doesn't.  That seems to be most jobs.  You're just right back into it.  It felt normal, and right.  There was a brief moment at the end of the day, when the realization that I was supposed to come back, every day, FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE set in, that got a bit grim, but then I shook myself and soldiered on.  At the end of the day, I am extraordinarily lucky.  I have a job I love, that I do well at, that I only rarely take home with me, that's a 25 minute bike commute from my home.  That's pretty darn good, folks.

We've got a good system set up, too.  We get up just before 6am (yes, you read that right).  The Dotytron does his thing, he sets out the Big Yam's breakfast (his current cereal breakfast fixation lends itself to set-up): a bowl of Shreddies, a glass of milk he can pour into the bowl, a vitamin, and then assembles the Big Yam's lunch, and does his thing.  I either go for a run, or eat my own breakfast and do a bunch of dinner prep.  By the time the Dotytron leaves for the day at around 7am, the babies are awake (and bless their souls, they're usually just lying awake, quiet in their cribs, waiting for someone to come and get them), we bring them down, I feed them breakfast, get myself ready, and our nanny shows up in time to clean them up and get all three boys changed and out the door for the day.  The Dotytron comes home, usually overlaps with the nanny for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, and uses that time to have her occupy the kids so he can get final dinner preparations done, and I walk in the door around 5:45pm.  It's a very sane, sensible, and manageable system.

The idea of school lunches seems to strike fear in the hearts of many parents.  It was listening to the neighbour-moms nattering about it that was the catalyst for me outsourcing the task to the Dotytron.  My neighbours swear by the hot lunch program at school, but it's $90/16 instructional days and I felt like we could make jumped-up substantial-snack type lunches for much less.  Really, it ain't no thing.  It takes him a maximum of 5 minutes.  Unlike my halcyon childhood, where I had a deli meat sandwich every day for my entire school existence,  we try to limit processed meats, so he only gets that twice a week.  One day he gets a homemade "lunchable" of crackers, kolbassa cut up, baby carrots, and cheese (curds, Babybel, cut up whatever we have in the cheese drawer).  One day he gets a mortadella/ham tortilla roll-up thing.  One day he gets a Wow Butter sandwich.  One day he gets leftover breakfast from the weekend (so, pancakes, waffles, French toast with a little container of syrup).  One day will be either dinner leftovers, a thermos thing like soup, or us trying to get him to try something new (egg salad, tuna salad, etc.).  He always gets a fruit on the side, or we bulk it up with yogurt.  So far our main problem has been him losing the spoons we give him to eat the yogurt with.   Today he took leftover Indian food from Friday Night Takeout Night (at his request): "I want to take the chicken and the rice and the beans.  Lots."  

I've also got a system in place for the weekly menu planning so that we can eat at a reasonable time and still give the kids time for outdoor play with the neighbourhood rugrats/bath/extended stories, etc.  I do one night a week where it's a prepared meal from the freezer, one night where it's a slow-cooker type thing, one night where it's a simple, one-pot pasta type dish.  One night is leftovers.  The idea is that this way, you're only ever doing night-of "cooking" twice a week (not including weekends, which is when I get to go to town, and when I produce those double-batches of things that end up in the freezer).  Listen people, there are people who have made careers out of this (Dinner: A Love Story blog, I'm looking at you!).  

Also, our nanny does LIGHT HOUSEKEEPING!!!  Every time you see the words "light housekeeping," please imagine me on my knees, raising my hands to the heavens in thanks.  Hiring a nanny was the best decision we ever made.  Before, when we left for work, the house would be in a state of disarray that ran the gamut from, "dishes left on the counter" to "dishes left on the counter AND vomit of unknown origin (cat/human?) left to solidify and turn crusty on the floor."  It wasn't pretty.  Now, I come home to a clean house!  Our amazing nanny tidies up so that I at least come home and I'm starting from a reasonable point.  Like, at the top of a pile of excrement with a backhoe loader, and not having to dig through the excrement to GET to the backhoe loader.  That's Booker Prize nomination-level writing there, folks.  She folds our laundry!  Cleans our floors!  Tidies the bathroom!  Vacuums!  I've got a system going where I do the laundry and leave the baskets out and if she has time, she does them.  I stressed to her that the main focus is obviously, the kids.  So the laundry will get folded only if she has time and has made sure to take a proper lunch break, etc.  I told her that between the three of us, it will get done.  

I've also made a point of staying device-free until everyone is put down to bed, because I only get two hours with those nuggets, and I want to be as present as possible for them, so they don't forget that I brought them into the world and as such, they OWE ME, DAMMIT.  

I took the Big Yam to see the Wiggles on Saturday and spent a pretty penny on seats (considering it's the Wiggles, after all).  The best part was that the night I told him at dinner we were going to see them, he spent a good ten minutes laughing, and shaking his head in disbelief going, "Nooooooooo"  "Noooooo!"  "C'mon, Mama, nooooooooo!"  "They don't even live here!"  "Noooooooo!"  That alone, made the price of admission worthwhile.  

Here are some photos of recent life:

I just have something stuck in my eye.

At the Wiggles concert on Saturday.

Goodbye, fall dinner: roasted chicken thighs, corn pudding, and a zucchini, potato, and tomato gratin with a breadcrumb topping jacked up with chopped capers and anchovies and fresh oregano.  So good!

I made a brown butter custard raspberry pie.  Lifted almost straight from this recipe here.  My only substitutions was upping the amount of butter to 4T in the filling and omitting the vanilla bean.  I would take out the nutmeg next time and maybe sub with ground cardamom.

Corned beef hash!

Kathi rolls from one of my favorite restaurants near my work, the Kathi Roll Express, which serves New York style kathi rolls.  Lamb seekh, butter chicken, chicken tikka, paneer skakslik, and the channa.  So freakin' good!

A late summer meal we had of steamed clams and arugula salad

Leftover lobster roll filling got repurposed for lobster carbonara pappardelle which was SO EFFING GOOD.  

Trout with browned butter, that gratin again, and sweet corn.

Fin.

Firsts and Lasts

The other day, the Big Yam was watching The Incredibles with the Dotytron.  There is a scene where Mr. Incredible comes across the skeletal remains of a vanquished superhero peer.  The Big Yam asked, "What happened to that guy?" and the Dotytron replied, "Well, when you die, your body turns into dirt and the skeleton is what's left" and without missing a beat, completely unfussed, the Big Yam said matter-of-factly, "I'm not gonna die."  It wasn't even a question - it was very much, "Oh that?  That doesn't apply to me."

That.  That is why the thought of him putting on his backpack with his little label on it, in his labelled shoes, with his labelled lunch bag, and labelled litterless lunch accoutrements (as I now know, a big part of getting ready for school involves spending an enormous amount of time and money on labeling things), and looking back at me when I drop him off tomorrow for his first full day of JK, when the door closes and he's in a class with about 20 other kids all confused and overwhelmed - that is why when I think about it I start to cry.  

I can tell him to get back up when he scrapes a knee and convince him he's fine and brush it off, but I won't be able to convince him he's fine when he realizes that the world is very, very big and can be very, very cruel, and that part of growing up in the world means losing your innocence.  And what is innocence if it's not the blissful ignorance of your own tenuousness?

Part of the deal with being hitched to a teacher is that as a consequence, your life is constantly given form by concrete beginnings and endings.  Starts and stops.  Fall and the firsts and summer and lasts.  Now I'm being thrown into it twofold.  The Big Yam had his last day with J his daycare provider two Fridays ago and she and I looked at each other and gave stern instructions that neither of us was to cry and then she handed me two thick binders of the "homework" she's been doing with him this entire time - his wobbly attempts at drawing faces, cutting straight lines, matching numbers and she started telling us how special and talented he is and I lost it (am losing it as I write this and remember).

Last week there was a 15 minute "interview" with the teacher which went really well.  There was all this DRAMA with his teacher assignment (to be detailed in a later post) and I was nervous but I met her and she is lovely.  She's no the most popular of the kindergarten teachers, but she emphasizes a lot of outdoor time (which I like) and her class size is only 15 kids, which is amazing.  The Dotytron always says that you can throw as much money at the education system as you want, but ultimately, it comes down to teacher student ratio (which is a money issue, at the end of the day), and the lower the ratio, the better your kid will do.  Then on Friday there was a one-hour "orientation" which means that we dropped him off at 9 and he stayed at school for an hour.  He looked so lost standing out there, with his giant backpack on and mayhem around him.  I kept it together for his sake and mine and then got our nanny settled with the babies at the drop-in centre and then walked home and bawled the whole way.  I anticipate more of that on Monday.

I read something on a mommy blog (I know, just shoot me now) that resonated though.  It was something someone's mom told them, to the effect of: "You just make sure that when your kids walk through the door at the end of the day, home is the most comforting place to be."  I know there is so much that I can't control, but that, I can do.  I will make sure that my kids feel supported and loved and safe within these walls and hopefully, that sense of security will allow them to carry "home" with them, throughout the day, as armor against the world's many, many indignities.

The point is: he's not just ours any more.  For the past 4 years we've been working on making him a person that will go out into the world and be kind, and moral, and productive, and now is the time for us to see how we did.  We've been getting him ready to be shared with the world and slowly broadening his circle bit by bit and now's the first big test.  I hope we get an A.  I am nothing if not the grade-grubber of all grade grubbers.

They set the bar kind of low in JK.  I went in to the interview with the teacher wondering if we should be working harder on sight words, and she came back at me with, "his only homework is to read a book each day," and she kept stressing the importance of reading and I was like, Lady, MAMA KNOWS.  We've recently started into chapter books.  I took him with me and we picked out Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which he was into for a day, but lately he's been more into Little House in the Big Woods.  He likes the pictures (so do I) and seems to be quietly absorbing some of it.  Sometimes we supplement the reading by looking up clips of panther screams so it can be a little more concrete for him.  I asked him to assign characters and he was like, "I'm Mary, you're Pa, Baba's Ma," and I asked, "Who would Lenny be?" and he said, "Lenny would be the big black cat" (the panther).  LOL!

People keep asking me how I feel about going back.  Fine, I guess?  I think it will be hard, but our nanny is wonderful and amazing and the kids love her and we've worked out a comfortable routine so knowing that is all squared away makes me feel good about going back.  Also: they opened a J. Crew near my work, so, um yeah, I'm stoked.  I've decided that my style icons are Jenna Lyons and Lucy Chadwick, with still some hippie boho Coachella vibes at home and weekends in the summer.

This layering game is so TIGHT.

One of the things I mastered this year while on maternity leave is the J Crew sleeve roll, so I'm feeling pretty good about that.  I'm on an extreme fitness regimen in the interest of losing weight so I don't have to buy a whole new work wardrobe.  I don't know if it's working or not...maybe a little?  It is making me feel very hungry every night when I go to bed and it is inspiring me to go for a 30 minute run so I can earn more calories so I can eat more sweets.  

Here are some pics from my life, lately:

Dr. Rei had her baby and he is an original nuttah and basically the best and he is making me want to have a million more babies so I can cuddle them and then largely ignore them while I use my phone and/or practice the J Crew sleeve roll.

We took the whole family to the Ex with our neighbours and their daughter and were there for 6 hours and I almost died from exhaustion but it was so worth it.

These two at Lowe's.  

Probably the last time they'll wear their South Beach onesies

Being a joker, as usual.

My goon squad.

The Wonder Twins have been going buck and seem to be doing some catch up.  The other day we had penne and meatballs for dinner and they ate 3 plates of pasta and 4 meatballs each and only stopped because the Dotytron wanted to save some for me.  They both have lots of words now, the cutest thing being that Lenny defaults to pointing at something and saying, "What's this" and the Quincess points at stuff and says, "That."  They are basically the embodiment of this jungle tune:

They also say "ball", "woof" (for dog), do the sign for "more", say "po-po" (Cantonese for "pick me up") and Poh Poh, as well as Mama and Baba.  The Quincess can say the Cantonese word for "light" and can also mimic you when you say "turtle."  They both love stories and reading, and the Quincess will often quietly sit and pretend to read Eric Carle's Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and sometimes sits and points to the pictures and "reads" out loud by saying, "Dut duh duh. Duh duh," with this regular cadence.  It's so cute.  Lenny is a wild man with no sense of caution.  At the wading pool he will crawl into water with his mouth open until it's over his head and not notice a thing.  

They are extraordinary beings and I love them the mostest.

Okay, gotta go decide which tree I'm going to hide and sob behind tomorrow morning!

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.