ten minutes to myself

there is a seven year-old girl inside of me

I am pleased to say that the first thing that springs into my mind when I remember 1984 is an incredible dystopian tome by George Orwell that I read in twelfth grade, but some people may remember that year as the one when our parents battled in the toy section of Sears to score one of these:

These are Alphonsine Clarissa and Glen Reuben, the two survivors of the 2010 Cabbage Patch Kid purge at my parents' house (four of their "siblings", as it were, didn't make the cut). Each of my kids brought one of my old dolls back to Saigon with us after our summer holiday. 

Over the last quarter-century, this pair has undergone a couple of changes. Alphonsine has been nicknamed "Nell" after the daughter of a friend of mine, and Glen, as it turns out, is gender-fluid. He's wearing cute hand-sewn coveralls in this pic, but I often find him lounging about in a frilly dress. This is probably because the majority of our extra outfits are traditional girl clothes. Still, the kids and I support his lifestyle choices whole-heartedly, and I've been advised that "fashion has no gender."

It's actually really fun for me to see Madeline and Sadie playing with my old dolls. The Cabbage Patch Kids and my collection of My Little Ponies are the toys that I remember playing with the most when I was little. My birthday and Christmas wish lists must have been crammed with CPK items because I know that I had a good collection of accesories: the knock-off Snuggli, a highchair that attached to a table, a playpen, a CPK diaper bag ... 

Nearly three decades later, my fondest memories of my Cabbage Patch Kid obsession are about these:

Somehow, somewhere in the mid-80s, my mom found to time to sew tons of tiny little outfits for the dolls that my sister and I had. Our dolls had fuzzy winter parkas. There was even a tiny pair of turquoise stirrup pants that matched a pair that I owned! Anyway, I think that I have to record "sewing little outfits for my Cabbage Patch dolls" as one of the awesome things that my mom has done. And they still look good on Alphonsine/Nell and Glen. 

could have been worse

When I was a child in the 1980's, one of the things making the world a scary place was the television series Little House on the Prairie.  For all of it's touted wholesomeness, I don't remember much about plotlines featuring the Ingalls sisters frolicking in the countryside or down by creek. I don't even remember a single reason why Laura Ingalls and Nellie Oleson went at each other's throats over and over again. No, I remember the scary tragic things, like Mary and Adam's baby perishing in a fire at the School for the Blind and the really bizarre episode arc about rapist in a mime costume lurking in the woods. And the one that creeps me out the most: the episode where Caroline very nearly almost amputates her own leg when her husband is out of town and there is no one around to take care of her.

Whenever Chris is traveling for business (which he does often),  I think of tv-series Caroline Ingalls and her infected leg wound, pondering her shiny knife. Because I so do not want to have to deal with any sort of medical emergency while I've been abandoned in a geographical location that does not currently have much more to offer by way of emergency medical services than Walnut Grove did in the 1800's.

So, as I was sprawled on the floor of the bottom level of my house on Wednesday night last week (the very same day that Chris flew out to Hanoi for meeting), having missed the last step on the stairs on my way down to see who on earth had rang our doorbell at 6 pm at night, I thought of poor, home-alone Caroline Ingalls.  And I hoped that the only price I'd have to pay for my carelessness was a sprained ankle. I could deal with sprained ankles, right?

I came home from the medical clinic the next day with an x-ray to forever comemmorate my small ankle fracture and a cast that stops just shy of my left knee. The nurse-practitioner called it a "walking cast" but I am not really sure how it would differ from a non-walking cast because there is nothing special about it as far as I can see. It's slippery on the polished stone floors in this house. It's really inconvenient here, too, because my kids' schools have stairs instead of elevators (or ramps, to be honest), and there is no such thing as handicapped parking near the entrance. I haven't been leaving my home much; I'm walking like Frankenstein's monster, and frankly this city is just too dirty to walk around in without a shoe on both of my feet and the ability to thoroughly wash both my feet. (And now I am very aware of how everyone stares at me as I lurch around).

I'm not used to being forced to slow down, but this first full week with the cast has gone by faster than I expected. It turns out that orders from a doctor to keep my foot elevated is a good incentive to crack open my new book on Adobe Lightroom and start editing all of our photos from last year. There's just a few more months to process, and I have another week in the cast. I think it will be enough time, on both counts.

actually

Back in December while we were on our Christmas holiday, one of my friends on Facebook linked to "One Teacher's Approach to Preventing Gender Bullying in the Classroom", and I quickly scanned it, liked it, and bookmarked it to get back to later, when I was back home. It took me about six weeks to get back to it. I shouldn't have ignored it for so long, though - it's really thoughtful and the best thing I've read about children and the gender spectrum. I'm not sure that anyone was paying much attention to this stuff when I was the same age as the kids in the article. 

I was thinking out the article again, the next day as I was drying our dinner dished, and all of a sudden, I remembered Anita.

Anita's grandfather lived next door to my grandparents (who always called him "The Dutchman", which I never understood and always felt a little uncomfortable about; they were all friendly and had a shared interest in vegetable gardening). Sometimes, when I'd be spending a Saturday afternoon at my grandparents' house, Anita would be doing the same thing, and we'd play together. 

Anita and I made mudpies and played on the aluminum swingset in my grandparents' backyard. We raced up the sidewalk in front of the houses, me on an ancient green tricycle and Anita on a Big Wheel (which I secretly coveted). And Anita would always say to me, "I'm actually a boy, you know. Even if I have a girl's name."

Anita wasn't like the girls that I played with at school, at all. I remember Anita showing off some impressive climbing skills by reaching the top of the posts supporting the awning over the concrete patio.

I was six years old and didn't think that girls were supposed to climb that high (or pedal a Big Wheel that fast), but I would still argue with Anita, babbling things like, "Of course you're a girl, Anita. Why do you say that you're not?" I was six years old and confused, so I echoed what the adults in my life told me about my friend. And I remember the calmness about Anita, repeating "I'm actually a boy, you know" with certainty like it was something that had been practiced a lot.

It's thirty years later, and after reading that article, I remembered my old friend, and I wonder if Anita is still saying "I"m actually a boy, you know."

dispatches from a tuesday

Yesterday, I had the following conversation with my three year-old:

"Uh-huh"

"Uh-uh"

"Uh-huh"

"Uh-uh"

"Uh-huh"

"Uh-uh"

"Uh-huh"

"Uh-uh"

Childish, yes, but I still won. 

 

And Madeline fell down the stairs. I think that she fell, once, about six stairs in our rental house in Newfoundland. But she was two years old then, and now she's half-way to eight. There were screams, shaking hysterics, ice pack applications to a cut on the back of her head. If she had been sleeping beforehand, I would be inclined to blame her spill on grogginess, but this was before she'd gone to bed for the night. Heads bleed a lot more than skinned knees, Chris and I realized. 

 

And a book recommendation: How to Be a Baby ... by Me (The Big Sister). Perhaps part of my infatuation with this book is the hilarious and on-the-nose performance Madeline gave while reading it to, but gosh, I was totally laughing. The little girl in the book comes up with lists of things that her infant brother can't yet do, and they are humorously inappropriate, like "can't slam dunk a basketball" and "can't use a stapler". 

 

 

peace river soundtrack

Tonight, I originally had a date with Photoshop Elements (to prepare for a date later this week with my in-progress 2011 photobook) , but it's plainly evident that I decided to cancel those plans in favour of a rendezvous with Typepad. One of the side-effects of being in a photography class is realizing just how cluttered, underexposed, and simply bad all of my previously-taken photos are, and I can't bear to look at flat photos of Hong Kong or wherever right now. 

Now, to finally get on topic, I've re-discovered what a huge crush that I have on my iPod. It's silly, but I've been playing more music around the house, and my three year-old has been singing and dancing more (to Dan Zanes and TMBG, and also to Adele and Bruno Mars), and it's twelve kinds of awesome. 

On a whim a few weeks ago, I downloaded a few tracks from iTunes that were from what I call, in all seriousness, my parents' era. With my new playlist humming away in the background as I washed yet another sink full of dishes by hand (always, always lamenting my lack of a dishwasher), I realized that I was listening to the first song that I can ever remember hearing. 

Second Hand News was part of the soundtrack on a road-trip I took with my parents sometime in the late nineteen seventies, and even though I honestly did not know the name of the song until three weeks ago, I'd never forgotten the melody.

I was either two or three years old, and we were making our way to Northern Alberta to visit my uncle. I can remember a wide bench seat, so I guess that we were riding in the red Chevy truck that my parents owned at the time (though I can't really imagine how they ever were the truck-owning sort of people). They'd thoughtfully tucked my little yellow potty seat into the space on the floor of the truck where my legs were too short to reach; the trip between Edmonton and where my uncle lived was a haul of at least eight hours, and there still probably aren't many rest-stops on the way. I spent the journey sitting the middle, tucked in-between my mom and my dad, and we were listening to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours.

Probably on eight-track. 

This explains why I am so darn smitten with that song again, right?

 

 

 

october starts spooky

A poltergeist.

That's what raced into my mind last night around half past ten as I stood halfway between our tv cabinet and the door of our den, momentarily paralysed as our electricity tripped on and off five or six times in quick succession. The lights in the kitchen flashed, and I could hear the motor in the a/c unit clicking and the generator outside reseting. It all happened in less than ten seconds, and I felt like I was caught in the middle of a suspense film!

Then I remembered, of course, that I live in a place with unreliably electricity and that we'd lost power at least a half-dozen times earlier in the day. Nothing like spastic like the display a minute ago, but probably nothing worthy of an X-File. Freaky, though.

The kids slept through all of the excitement, and Chris and I managed to get the a/c working again about thirty minutes later. 

 

how i met your father

On Friday morning, I'll probably be dashing about between our bedroom and the kids' bedrooms, trying to supervise the getting-ready-for-school process, and Chris will interrupt my chaos to remind me that it's our nineth wedding anniversary. My kids might tease me, thinking that I had forgotten - but I haven't! I'll have to tell them that I consider the story of me and their dad as starting much, much earlier.

I absolutely remember the first time that I met him, in the Tory lecture theatres at the U of A in 1995. We were both enrolled in Legal Relations 301, which was a required class for their business degree program. He usually sat a few rows ahead of me (I'm a people-watcher, which is how I noticed this in a lecture theatre that held a few hundred students) with a couple of his friends, but this one day in September or October, the spot to the left of me was one of the few vacant ones left. He sat down,  his right hand setting his bookbag down at his feet and the left occupied with not tipping his take-away cup of coffee. The first thing he ever said to me was a friendly comment about how he was blown away by how other people could manage to balance  so many things in their arms at once: mobile phones, coffee cups, briefcases, small children, etc.  If I recall correctly, the lecture that day was on tort law. Our professor told a few hilarious stories about nonsensical lawsuits, like how some guy wanted to sue his next-door neighbour for stealing his psychic energies, and I remember the guy with the coffee beside me commenting that I was laughing way too much.  Maybe I was, but his eyes were laughing when he said that to me.

If we ended up sitting next to each other in Legal Relations 301 again that semester, it wasn't more than one other time. But that didn't matter - once I started looking for him, I realized that we actually had a couple other classes in common and we'd run into each other at the campus train station a lot. Because my people skills are rather awkward, it took a couple of weeks for me to manage to introduce myself, but I did, on the LRT on an afternoon when we ended up sitting across from each other.  And then I learned his name, too (strangely enough, I had suspected the entire time that his name would be Chris).

I'm not certain how many other lectures or weeks passed before I had to admit to myself that I was becoming rather smitten with this guy. He had soft-looking curly hair, eyes that reminded me of the colour of iced tea, and we'd have the best conversations; I'd never met a guy before who loved Broadway musicals as much as I did. Those five-or-ten minute casual chats were usually the highlight of my day.

I also noticed that he was very friendly with a lot of other girls in the Faculty of Business. If anything, it was nice to have confirmation that he was actually into girls. I assumed that he was socially very busy.

We met up a couple of times over the summer break, after he had returned from a holiday in NYC (which he spun as a solo trip by himself when speaking about it to me, but the truth came out later). First we saw the musical The Who's Tommy together (and went out for a very nice dessert afterwards), and later in August we saw some show that I don't remember at the Edmonton Fringe. Chris was actually reminiscing about this outing last weekend - according to his memory, we walked all the way from Old Strathcona to where I caught the bus home at Edmonton Centre and I didn't say a single word the entire time. I can't see that being true, but I honestly don't remember. Maybe I was consumed with wondering why he was following me halfway home? Regardless, it was actually very thoughtful of him to go on this forty-minute hike to the bus stop with me at eleven o'clock at night. 

I think that the last class that we had together was Decision Analysis in the fall semester of 1996 (this was also the only class we had together in which he received a higher grade than I did).  What I remember the most about our interactions that year would be running into Chris on Mondays, listening to him recount the perceived awesomeness of whatever he and his friends had done on Saturday nights, and then say to me, "Laura, you should have come along!" Well, he should have asked me to, then. It got very annoying.

The academic year ended, I went to work at a government job over the break, continued to write hopefully amusing and regular emails to Chris so that he wouldn't forget me over the summer, and had a brief workplace flirtation with the third boy that I'd ever had a crush on (Ritchie, a geek who left poems that he'd written on my desk). In the fall, I was off on another workterm, so I didn't see Chris again until his last semester of classes before he graduated. Even then, I didn't see him much. We had no classes together, and the only thing that he seemed to be capable of talking about when I'd run into him on campus was the huge drinking party that he was in the process of planning (which he'd probably call a "conference" if he was writing this). I think that we did manage to see a couple of plays at the Citadel Theatre together. Anyways, I thought that we had a good friendship and I missed his company.  

Chris finished his degree in June of 1998, and went to work in one of those professional offices in downtown Edmonton. We met up once that summer, to see Saving Private Ryan together. If memory serves me correctly, he scooted off after the film was over, sheepishly saying that he was expected home by an un-named someone (I think that he denies this now). 

I went back to class in September and starting tailoring my courseload to head to graduate school in a year's time. At some point, I stopped receiving emails from Chris and I stopped sending them as frequently. The crush that I'd been secretly carrying around for three years was relegated to a less-used drawer in the filing cabinet in my brain. I was too busy to actively pine away when I had the GMAT to prepare for, a challenging courseload, and I even had a bit of a social life to nuture.

In May of 1999, I accepted a spot in a Master's degree program at the University of British Columbia, and started harrassing my old friend Chris via email again (oh, the things we did before text messaging was invented). I wanted to get together one more time before moving to Vancouver. The timing was rather opportune - he told me that he was moving to a small town in rural Alberta. We met for lunch at the Hardware Grill  after the last final exam I was proctoring for one of my professors. My memory has forgotten what I ordered, but I do remember that Chris told me a story involving vomit and his allergy to pecans.

The really awesome thing about his move to the small town is that there must not have been too much to do there, because I heard from him all the time! I kind of felt like I finally might have had his undivided attention, after nearly five years. Our friendship was a lifeline for me - I was struggling and unhappy in Vancouver for many reasons. In the spring of 2000, we started planning to meet up for a holiday in London and Paris (this would have the third trip to London that I'd planned, but the first one to be succesful), and things finally came together for us as a twosome when we were abroad that June.

I returned to UBC and hurried to finish up my Master's thesis so that I could move back to Alberta at the end of the year, and Chris turned down a job transfer to the happening metropolis that is Cornach, Saskatchewan and moved to Calgary to work for the company he's still working for today. We became engaged in the bar at the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan in October 2001, and we dressed up and signed the legal paperwork in Oban, Scotland in 2002. And that's why we're here together today, and I am regularly thankful that there was that empty seat beside me in Legal Relations 301 on that autumn day sixteen years ago.

 

tv is vietnam is usually not worth writing about

Freaky Coincidence of the Day: This afternoon, I was thinking of watching something a movie with the kids, so I turned on our television before going over to the cabinet where our DVDs are. I changed my plans when I realized that the tv was tuned to one of the English-language movie channels, and Julie & Julia was playing. The reason that I didn't change the channel was because the book I'm currently reading is Julia Child's  My Life in France! 

I'd watched this movie before, and I've read and re-read Julie and Julie: My Year of Cooking Dangerously over the years, but this time when I watched, I was much more interested in the parts about Julia Child than Julie Powell (no offense, intended).

I had never realized how closely "My Life in France" influenced the portrayal of Julia Child in the film. It was fantastic to see how true to life her start at the Cordon Bleu was shown in the film (first with new-to-the-kitchen housewives, finally surrounded completely by male GIs, for example), and fun to see what her favourite shop for cooking equipment at Les Halles might have actually looked like. This was honestly a highlight of my Sunday!

things making me happy this week

1. Next week, both of my children will be in school! I will have a little bit of quiet in my life, at least until noon!

2. I've had much too much fun discovering all of the episode reviews of Star Trek: TNG at the AV Club. When I was sixteen, I swore up and down that I was the least likely person on earth to watch anything Star Trek, but my rapid tranformation into a devoted fangirl was totally accidental. I was flipping channels one day and stopped on the channel that showed a sweet elderly couple dancing around their living room. I kept watching, only to become aghast when Patrick Stewart and some of his Starfleet-uniformed colleagues beamed onto the old couple's dance floor. But I still kept watching. And now I can tell you, from memory, that this was the episode called "The Survivors" from Season 3. My favourite season. 

3. The corporate dinner I accompanied Chris to this week was more interesting that I was anticipating. The Temple Club here in Saigon is a fabulous restaurant, but the really cool thing was realizing that some of the other attendees were flying back to the US on the company's private jet. How cool does that sound? 

4. That little "Your order has shipped" email from Mpix.com, less than twelve hours after I ordered the prints to begin with. It will be nice to see some of the photos from our family photo session back in February actually printed out instead of on my computer screen. 

5. The defunct tv-series "Party Down". I asked Chris to download it on whim, having read a bit about it in some article in the Edmonton Journal this summer. I wasn't sold on it at first, but we're now about six episodes into the first season and I'm laughing a lot. Can't wait to sit down together tonight and watch a little bit more after the kids are in bed.

6. News that my sister bought the same pair of basic black Fluevog heels that I've had for over a year now. I usually assume that my sense of style (or lack thereof) bores her, so it's kind of fun that we can be shoe-twins.

6. It's totally worth repeating - all of my children will be in school as of next week. I cannot properly explain how awesome it will be to not have a small person talking at me all day long. 

things I've been doing instead of blogging

1. I decided that I really ought to have my 2010 photobook ready to go before the end of the school year, just in case MyPublisher happens to float another 60% off coupon code, like the one that I missed at the beginning of the month. So, I've been spending my evenings futzing with PSE 9 to prep the digital images and so forth. I'm finished with the photos from our move from Bangkok to Saigon, so the book is halfway finished, and I'm feeling good about it!

2. I've been rolling out a new bedtime routine for Sadie - one where she falls asleep on her own in her bed, instead of with me beside her. She used to fall asleep alone in her crib before we moved last summer, but she spent about two months combined sleeping in beds while we were in the service apartment here in Saigon and staying with my parents last summer. I was quite worried that she'd never stay *in* a bed or fall asleep in one unless I was there to see it with my own two eyes. While it worked well, I realized that it was not really a great sleep habit to have been perpetuating over the last eleven months. In case anyone is wondering, Sadie is sort of pissed off when I kiss her goodnight, but she does roll over, cuddle her SPOKA, and fall asleep on her own (okay, she might get out of bed once or twice). 

3. Inventorying my stash of over-the-counter meds and vitamins to see what needs to be re-stocked the next time I'm in the developed world. I over-bought children's vitamins last year, but didn't pick up enough Tylenol Melt-Aways. And we're nearly out of sunscreen! Conveniently, the EWG has released their 2011 safer sunscreen report - and my fave Neutrogena Baby Pure & Free still doesn't rank very well ... sigh.

4. Tucking my nearly-seven year-old in bed an average of three times a night.

5. Procrastinating over the knitting project that I started and abandoned in January.

6. Being sucked into reality tv. But Curtis Stone is a great host for Top Chef Masters!

And after that, I have no excuses left :)