No really, I do think it is. All you bullhorn/water bucket/screaming drill sergeant enthusiasts can go sit in the truck, because this. is. way. worse.

You’re not awake enough to scream, but awake enough that you abruptly jolt out of REM, and bleat out a muffled potty mouth word. Then your child begins to cry because you have scared her, and you are bigmeannasty mommy for doing that. You were supposed to wake up calmly, and have prompt let-down for the bottomless pit now pawing at you to let her nurse.

This groggy state of affairs while you check for blood? Totally not her fault. She’s hungry, yo, and you were not in the right position for her convenience. Wake up, Milk Bar! *chomp*

Yeah, I’m awake now, you… you… darlingdearestchildofminethatIlovewithallmyheart *wheeze*.

That was the routine that played out last night several times. Bite, cry, eat, sleep. Bite, cry, eat sleep. And my daughter did some crying too. It was like somehow we had merged into a teenage girl with a pint of Rocky Road, upset because Billy asked Marci to the prom instead of her. Or… euch. I don’t even want to go there. I’m too tired. Must. Have. Caffeine. Can you mainline coffee?

My beautiful daughter has four teeth. She has been gloriously teething for a week now. Nothing to show for it. Nada. Not even a hint of a new tooth. This morning, once we had rolled out of bed, she chewed on the leg of the table, her brothers pants, a Hot Wheels car, the edge of her high chair, a Skwish, and her own hand. All the while, making this noise: “Amnamanamanamanamanama”.

She is also channeling a St. Bernard, because the amount of drool is insane. Seriously, where does it all come from? My son never teethed like this. He was civilized and although perpetual, prompt with the appearance of teeth. And I never got bit. Like ever. Right.

Do you like my new rose-coloured glasses? I think they make me look way smarter.

If we have to deal with this again tonight, Mommy is wearing her super-duper padded nursing bra to bed. Take that, my little woodchuck. And if you insist on continuing to bite Mommy in the general vicinity of her chest, guess what…

Its ok. We’ll deal, and it will all be over soon.

I mean, look at our cars. They are not designed for sub-zero weather. If we had any sense, we would only ever buy cars that would work super well in -20 degree temperatures (Celcius, for those folks on the other side of the border). Things like power doors and windows really aren’t meant to take the frigidity of our winters. Windshield washer fluid nozzles that get clogged with snow? I bet the dude who designed their location on cars lives in Arizona.

For example:

This morning my car’s doors were all frozen shut. After a few tugs, the driver door came open, and I was able to lean across and open the passenger door. My daughter’s side opened, but my son’s wouldn’t.

Just as I was about to start flailing and screaming at it give up, it opened with a squeal. Thank God. In loaded the kids and off we went. I should have turned off the child locks at that point. But noooo, I was too focused on just getting. my. cranky. child. to. daycare.

Now I don’t know about you, but when you try to turn a corner with a car, you expect the wheels to turn, right? Turn the steering wheel, tires follow suit. Yeah… As I backed out the driveway, I heard a popping, and a crunching noise, and the steering wheel wouldn’t budge.

It seems that the road sludge my dear, dear husband accumulated in the tires this weekend froze solid overnight. Thank you eversomuch for not cleaning out the wheel wells, darling love-of-my-life. I wanted a workout this morning. Tearing the doors off the car was great cardio, but chipping out frozen ice with your massive scraper (which I despise using, by the way)… Man my delts really burn now! *arrr-grrr*

I decided to get a coffee. I needed that coffee. No, I more than needed it. It was essential to keep me sane. As I drove up to the speaker at the coffee shop, the window wouldn’t budge. NO amount of pounding on the down button would make it move. Begging and pleading didn’t move it. I wanted to beat my car senseless with a tire iron.

Instead of elegantly ordering my coffee and feeling snappy and with-it, I had to look like a complete moron and order coffee through an open car door, and then get out of my car in the Drive Thru to get said coffee. I got a donut too, since I needed some sort of balm to soothe my tortured, frozen soul. *Omnomnomnom*

Baby was asleep when I arrived home, and I was silently thanking God for a small miracle. I would have a few moments to sit in my nice warm house, enjoy my nice, warm coffee, and think nice, warm thoughts. Nuh-uh.

I walked around the car, and when I tugged on the door handle, nothing happened. I pressed the auto-unlock button on the key fob. Nothing. I flailed and yanked. I begged and pleaded. I body-checked. It was as if it was crazy-glued.

It was then that I crawled monkey-like up the front seat and attempted to open the door from the inside. I did a *facepalm* when I realized the child locks were on. I was going to have to squeeze my round post-partum arse into the space between the car seats and pull the whole thing out the other side. I thought about taking her out the back hatch. It too, was frozen shut.

Cue a moment of foot-stomping, howling rage, and mitten waving here, as well as a well placed kick to a tire. Ow.

After some wrangling, shoving, pulling, and swearing, the car seat was yanked out past my son’s massive rocket seat. I only scraped my knuckles once (which hurts worse when it is cold, if you didn’t know). Baby stayed asleep, if you can believe it, and when we got inside, I sagged against the door, coffee in hand, silently cursing the makers of my fine automobile parked in the driveway. I also cursed the cold weather, winter, and my wonderful ever-loving husband.

Just another cold winter day for a driver in Canada.

Or rather, a toy attacked my foot as I innocently wandered past.

It had razor-sharp edges, and cat-like stealth in its perfectly camouflaged position, nestled in the carpet. The bite was absolute. The seizure inducing pain lingered, my attempts to hop and wiggle the agony away in vain.

Words like “fudge ripple” and “sugar cookies” came floating out of my mouth like the most sublime Shakespeare. In my eloquence, I damned the toy to the seventh level of Hell from whence it came. No curse was more complete in its rendering.

Upon finding the toy, I refrained from pulverizing its shiny, rectangular form by mortar and pestle, and instead flung it into the depths of the toy box, banning to the darkness with its conspirators.

I’ll be ready next time, you small, plastic menace. Just you wait and see.

Great big gobs of white stuff is finally falling from the skies. I want it to snow, and snow, and snow so that there is metres of it on the ground and we can’t do anything but make hot chocolate and burrow under blankets watching movies and taped episodes of some kids show my son is nuts about.

Comfort.

Despite the cold, the ice rain that fell earlier, and the sheer inconvenience of the slippery walkway and shovelling that will need to be done, a snowstorm is so comforting this time of year. It verifies our need to hibernate, it gives us the opportunity to wear cozy, warm clothes and seek out guilty pleasures we don’t normally give ourselves permission to have. It lets us reinvigorate our faith in Winter, and the inevitable ritual of the season.

Beautiful.

The whiteness is intoxicating if you think about it. The beauty of the falling snow gives us romantic ideas of fires in the fireplace, and a bearskin rug. Even folks who would never normally want a dusty, ratty bearskin rug in their house would gladly park themselves on one in front of a hearth when it is snowing.

Promising.

Snow helps us conjure up the image of perfectly paired skiers carving down a slope, or an expertly waxed wooden toboggan with six children aboard, careening down a hill. The flash of an ice skate blade, the sound of a snowball hitting someone’s back and disintegrating. The collective steam from everyone’s breath. The promise of fun, and the lure of play.

But the real reason behind my desire for heaps of snow is this:

When it snows, my son looks out the window, and with excitement that cannot be measured, he will turn to us and say,

“Mommy, look! Its a snow day!”

Since my birthday falls so early in January, I don’t normally celebrate the turning of one year to another until then. Privately, I think I prefer having this one concession to myself. I don’t like to think about the new year until then. The next day, its a deep breath and a “Here we are!” that sets the tone. Sometimes that tone is to continue pell-mell along the same path, other times it is a day to reflect. This year was a reflection day, having a teething, stuffy baby sleeping on me, and not much power to do anything other than read and stare out the window.

And no, I don’t do resolutions. I gave up on that years ago.

Everyone has one. A non-official time of year that stands in for the real one. Maybe, secretly, your new year starts when you go back to school in September, when the leaves are falling. Maybe for you the new year starts when you put in your garden, the land so full of promise and life. We all do it, even if we don’t admit it to anyone. We all have our own personal New Years.

What is yours? What unofficial traditions do you have on those days? What ceremony do you have to mark the day?

~C

I have not posted in quite some time. My apologies. Not going to beat myself up about it.

I’ve been kind of busy.

But, on a positive note, I’m averaging 500 words a day on my current WIPs, so I am kicking A$$ with available time versus words written. At this rate, I may actually finish something in a few years (har). The worst part is deciding which WIP to work on each day for that coveted half hour I allow myself. I have several, which may be a stupid endeavour, but its kind of how my scatterbrain works. Just can’t confuse them, or whoever gets to edit these might become very vexed with me.

However… The point of today wasn’t to get into anything specific. I wanted to send a shout out and link up to a friend’s new blog. Check out OttawaMichelle. She’s a new blogger in the Ottawa area. Go give her some love.

While you’re at it, think up a name for a greasy spoon diner breakfast special. I’m working on a diner scene in one WIP, and need something fun to name a plate of eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, and hashbrowns with a pancake. My overtired brain can’t come up with anything good right now, hence why I am here, and not (figuratively) at the diner writing my scene. The name of the diner is Dracon Plates.(sharp A, hard c, “dray-con”, not dray-son or drah-con).

Ya’ll gotta help me!

View the blog post here. Sherri, the blog writer, defines passion as such:

Passion.

That ONE thing that excites you so much you jump out of bed each morning excited and enthused to do it.

That ONE thing, that if you had to, you’d do for free.

That ONE thing you know so much about that you could write a text book on the subject and you never get bored of learning more.

She then goes on to say that it can be difficult to define your passion, and some of the ways you can find them again, and how its ok not to know. There are more factors at play than meets the eye. Uh huh…

It made me think about my passions over the years, and wondering where they are now. It made me try and list my passions right now. It made me ask myself where the passionate and happy person I know I am went, along with all those ideas and ambitions. I think she ran away and joined the circus, or she’s still on vacation where there are lots of horses and muscular stable boys. Bon-bon, dear?

This blog post about passions poked one of the navel-gazy (Hey look… lint!) thought processes I have had since becoming pregnant with my second child. What are my true passions? How I am going to re-find Me when I have this baby? Who am I? Where am I? What makes up Me? The defineable laundry list  of “things” and “ideas” is there, and I look through it now and again, and realize a lot of the list has not been touched for a long time. I can blow proverbial dust off of it. Heck, it was underneath the wrinkled shirt pile, abandoned sippy cups, and unfiled bills from two years ago.

Me, me, me… I know that sounds selfish, and I know I make light of it, but it is serious. As I look towards the impending birth of my daughter, I realize I need to focus on Me so that I can be the best mom and female role-model for her, and also for my son as he grows.

Right now, I don’t feel like I am. I feel like I am on autopilot, and I have placed a lot of my own passions aside for when we can afford it, when I have time, or some rainy Saturday afternoon when I am not trying to extract a toddler from the chandelier.

Since becoming a wife and mom, I have kind of lost Me, and poured all of my passion and myself into my family, especially my child. Since having children, I let my husband take the lead on a lot of decisions because I don’t have the energy or passion to make them myself. Its hard not to take on a follower role when you are tired. When your child is born, you are consumed with their needs, ensuring their welfare, stimulating their world. You take second place to that child’s needs since they cannot help themselves. Its exhausting.

Showers are a thing of the past.  Sleep is overrated. Zombie-mom is in da houz.

But, gradually, as they learn to sit up, walk, use a spoon and a cup, talk, talk back, dress themselves, potty (please let that happen soon) and sleep through the night, you can relax and re-take human form – sort of. Phrases like “Please stop stuffing Goldfish up Daddy’s nose… Yes I know he’s snoring…” can turn you from Human Mom to Auto-Mom, repeating yourself over and over to the chorus of NO, or Quiasi-modo-Mom, running hunched over to save whatever fragile thing is in your son’s hand (read: iPhone, treasured first edition book, cheque from Sun Life).

After all that, you look in the mirror, realize you haven’t had a haircut in a year, the wrinkles around your eyes don’t make you look so wise after all, and you say “Hi there, who the [bleep] are you?”. (To which your child, in the next room, answers “MOMMY!”)

Passions? Ummm yeah, when I have my own time, I like to… ummm… *shrug*… stare brainlessly at a TV or computer until I pass out, wearing a stained, stretched t-shirt and yoga pants with a missing drawstring.  Oh yeah… this invokes passion. Sexy.

With my coming year off on maternity leave, my inward thought-focus, and a new infant to be there for, I have resolved to refocus. I have determined I must ask for time for myself. I have to schedule my sanity breaks, and ensure my husband does too. And hopefully we don’t both need them at the same time. “But Honey, tonight its my turn to hide in the front closet…“

Having two children will be chaos. I realize this. Finding time and energy will be even more difficult than it was before. Deciding what to spend my limited Me-Time on will be excruciating. Balancing it all will be akin to standing on a rubber ball with a tray of Waterford Crystal in each hand. Brushing my hair or drinking tea while it is still hot may become a luxury. Learning to laugh about it and keep going will be immeasurable.

But I also know I will be able to handle the chaos better if I can rekindle my passions, get motivated, be happy, and find Me again. I need to in order to be my best – for me – and for them.

Otherwise I may just run away and join the circus, taking all my horses, stable boys, and bon-bons with me. ♥

As we angled South, and then East along the lake, long, metallic fingers jutted out from the shore like shards of fingers, bitten off at odd angles as they stretched. They obliterated everything around them, reflecting light back into my eyes, shielded through the tinted glass of my window.

I recalled the view as it was well over ten years ago now, a full view of the CNE gates, the Skydome, the lake, the Fairmont. The CN Tower used to be unfathomably tall, a jutting appendage upwards, dwarfing all around it. Now, it seemed crowded out by tall skyscraper buildings, each a mirror of the other, each advertising their luxurious lifestyle, opulent vista, convenient commute. Each facing off against the other in a battle to reign supreme over the real estate patch they claimed.

I gaped transfixed at the transformation of a city I had spent so much time in as a young person, first enjoying the subway, Honest Ed’s and the Kensington market as a child, then enjoying the sometimes granular nature of the waterfront, the nightlife as a young oppotunistic adult. I wondered where the preservation of what used to be had gone, and if anyone was bothering to think about it as trucks and cranes moved ever forward to cover yet another hole in the ground. Long gone were the squat warehouses and red brick factories, the rectangular billboards, the mixture of different building colours and design jumbled together, all bright colours and shapes mixing to form a type of visual music.

Now in their place were gleaming cookie-cutter towers of progression, blocking the sun and the history they were sitting on. My rose-coloured glasses were firmly entrenched on my nose when we reached Queen St and descended down under the streetcar wires from our perch on the highway.

I mourned for the coldness of this new Toronto as we drove through. I felt like a part of my past was truly gone, buried beneath these buildings, erasing the essence of what this city was, to me. The cacaphony of the corporate profit machine drowned my ability to really look around me, and I felt whipped about by the massive amount of change to what used to feel so unique. Everything was generic;  shiny and glossy and new, the absence of individuality gone. I felt bereft of culture until we had driven through this condo forest, away from the noise of metal and concrete reaching for the sky, the roar of the consumer-driven architecture.

Now and then though, a glimpse of a store, a neighborhood, or familiar building would remind me that the Toronto I remember is still there.

Its just harder to see.

He will also pat my belly in passing, remarking “Bee-Bee!” or he will stop to rub my belly with both hands if the fabric of my shirt is soft. Its a sight to behold, his concentration evident by the little wrinkles between his eyebrows, little hands rubbing in both directions, exclaiming “Soft…  Soft.”

It’s rather soothing, to be honest. I much prefer that to a head-butt.

However, not only does he like to interact with this new exciting idea of a baby sister, he has some very concrete observations. Observations such as the most recent idea about what is in Mommy’s belly…

“I hear spiders!” he said the other night as he laid his head on my belly and listened. I looked at my husband and then back at my son. Spiders? Really?

“Spiders? There are no spiders in mommy’s belly, only a baby girl.” I said back, trying desperately not to laugh.

He laid his head back on my belly after much assurance his little sister was indeed NOT a spider, then gasped after my stomach rumbled. He lifted his head, the excitement palpable.

“What did you hear?“

“I hear a unicorn!” He exclaimed, and then went to play, as if a unicorn was the most normal of things to find in a Mommy’s belly.

“What are you scared of, sweetie?”

“Owls.”

“Why are you afraid of owls?”

“Owls in the bed.”

“Owls aren’t scary, owls are nice!”

“Owls in the bed at night…  Scared.”

“There are no owls in the bed, sweetie. Owls live outside in trees. Owls eat bugs. Owls are nice.”

“Scared… Owls are nice?”

“Yes.”

“Ok.”

This was my conversation last night with my son, in a darkened room, him sitting up, the bedsheets and his pillows strewn helter-skelter over the twin-sized frame. For half an hour, we had listened to him make whimpers, thinking “He’ll settle into sleep soon-He’ll settle into sleep soon…” only to have it escalate to “MOMMY… MOMMY…” and what sounded like crying. With a sigh and a heave, up I went, looking at the time and wondering just how grumpy our entire family would be in the morning. (edit: very)

He’s suddenly made the distinction of being afraid of things. Never before, even when we first started putting him to sleep each night in his toddler bed, would he ever give us indication of fear. But now, he has said he is scared. Monsters driving cars, spiders, and now owls.

“Scared.”

“Of what, sweetie?”

“Spiders.”

“Like in the song?”

“Yeah.”

“Spiders aren’t scary. They are itsy-bitsy!”

“Sing dat song? Sing Issy-bissy spiders?”

I wondered if one of the children he plays with in his group at day care had given him scary ideas, since this is a brand new emotional response to the dark and sleep since he was moved to his new group and room. I wondered if a book we had read was influencing him, or one he had read at day care. I wondered if the washing machine going “thumpa-thumpa” below him gave him bad dreams. I wondered if a new night light was in order. I wondered about a lot of things as we lay there in the dark, his squirming little body and poking fingers keeping us both awake as the clock ticked forward towards midnight.

Mostly I wondered how best to combat this newfound level of awareness in my son. The last thing I wanted was for him to be scared. I wanted him to sleep happily. No nightmares or fears.

“Scared… Monsters.”

“Monsters? Why are you scared of monsters?”

“Monsters in the bed.”

“Monsters aren’t scary sweetie. Is Grover or Elmo scary?”

“No… Not doz monsters.”

“Which monsters are scary?”

“Monsters dat drive cars.”

“Oh… They do?”

“Yeah… Monsters drive n’ cars to Sodor.”

“What will they do in Sodor?”

“Go see Cranky th’ Crane. Cranky pick up Thomas.”

“I see.”

“Thomas go on a boat.”

“What about the monsters?”

“Monsters drive in car to Sodor n’ then go play wit’ Percy.”

“Mommy and Daddy drive cars, are they scary?”

“No… Not dat scary.”

“So maybe monsters in cars aren’t scary.”

“Not scary?”

“Maybe they’re just like Mommy and Daddy driving cars.”

“Mommy drive? Daddy drive daycare, go to work?”

“Yes, we do, sweetie.”

“Mommy Daddy drive.”

“I know, maybe the monsters have fun and laugh and smile in their cars just like us.”

“Oh… Ok.”

But, I thought, as I went and got his father to take over as my tolerance and exhaustion hit bottom, at least now he can tell me what is wrong, we can talk about it, and I can try my best to help him.

I have no idea if I am getting it right. I hope I am.