ten minutes to myself

the best feeling in the world ...

... is wearing a shoe on both of my feet. 

My cast was taken off on Friday, and it was a huge relief. The world of proper showers, footwear, and actual traction on our stairs was re-opened to me, and I've been enjoying all of those things an awful lot. 

I was, though, unprepared to see my left lower leg and foot again. Firstly, the amount of dead skin that my leg was shedding was sort of disgusting and unreal. I've never resembled a snake in the process of shedding it's skin more in my life. Also, four weeks of immobilization did a crazy number on the muscle tone in my lower leg. I swear that my calf almost looks concave. It's frightening, to me, how weak my lower leg and ankle are. 

How ridiculous I was is now obvious, thinking that I'd get my cast off and be back in spin class the next week! First broken bone of my life, so this is a lesson that I'm learning in my mid-thirties. I'm still limping around and wondering if my foot is ever going to be less flappy.

 

those kids that I write about sometimes are still around

There is something sort of backwards about parent-teacher conferences here; I had a twenty-minute chat with my three year-olds preschool teacher (memorable comment: "Sadie applies yellow to all colours indiscriminately") yet had a mere ten minutes to cover four months of progress with Madeline's second grade teacher. 

Regardless of the brevity of the latter conference, everyone is doing fairly well. Even if I don't like how much of an informational black box Madeline's school is, she's happy to participate and her teacher has really been encouraging her reading skills. Madeline's entire grade - so, about 115 students - put on a play last week; Neverland had an astoundingly large population of pirates and Lost Boys, but Madeline sang and danced and spoke her one line in the play with enthusiasm.

Sadie is moving up from the Caterpillar Room to the Butterfly Room. Her preschool supports the multi-age classroom concept, and I think that she's the oldest kid in her current class. I am a little sad that she won't be finishing off the year with her current teacher and friends, but I also think that it will be nice that she'll be familiar with the new room and teacher before the summer break. In theory, this should make the transition back to school in August easier, right? 

 

things making me happy this week

The Big One - About three weeks ago, I took my shiny and new external hard drive out of it's packaging and backed up the files on my MacBook. The files in my documents folder, my iTunes library, photos (also: not easy to locate the actual image files when they've been imported into iPhoto), and my completed photobooks. I have Time Machine set up, but I like having a Plan B.

This makes me happy because the internal hard drive died yesterday. I kind of knew that it was coming (hence, the back-up). The thing making me a little less happy this week is that I don't have the photobook that I finished up last week on the external drive, and a couple of things that I'd downloaded from iTunes. Now, the challenge is to find a replacement hard drive for a late-2008 MacBook Pro. 

Another thing making me happy: New music! I picked up Some Nights by Fun. (what's with the punctuation?). The very first track is totally cracking me up - it's performed like it's the opening number to a Broadway show. 

And: I have an episode of Community to watch. First one. Am prepared to laugh hysterically.

And: This video of Idina Menzel performing Poker Face. Her added commentary is hilarious.

Lastly: Hopefully my cast will be off in a week. It's like wearing a warm winter boot in the middle of summer. Summer in Arizona.

 

infinite possibilities

I'm not entirely sure how the subject came up, but last night Madeline mentioned that she was now thinking of teaching as a future career option, instead of becoming a veterinarian. It's been a few years since she talked about wanting to go to veterinary school, but her dad seemed bothered by the change and remarked that she must be following my example. 

It's true that I've had many answers to the "what do you want to be when you grow up" question. I thought that was sort of normal. This is where I point out that the very first time that Chris and I hung out together outside of university, he told me that he modeled himself after Alex P. Keaton and wanted to be an accountant since sometime in the 1980's. Obviously, my husband has a different perspective and very good plan execution.

So, today I've been having a little fun remembering all of the careers that I've thought about, ever since I was old enough to start thinking about the big picture. Here's what I can recall:

• a ballerina
• Betty Rubble
• a teacher
• owner of a pet shop
• cashier at a grocery store
• a psychiatrist 
• a crime-fighting mathematician, like on Mathnet.
• a criminal lawyer
• a medical officer in the US Navy, preferably stationed on an aircraft carrier
• a MuchMusic VJ
• Shakespearean stage actor (awesome costumes, yes?)
• trauma surgeon
• English Lit. teacher
• Medieval England scholar
• Accountant
• Stockbroker
• Interior Decorator (at the height of my obsession with Trading Spaces)
• Personal Chef

And I am sure that there are more that are missing from that list. It was kind of fun, when I was little, imagining all of the possibilities and learning a bit about a lot of different things. Madeline's not even eight years old, and I'm just going to be impressed that her career aspirations are set a little higher than mine at the same age (owner of a pet store). 

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."

training for this for half my life

I ventured into downtown Saigon today, on a mission to find a couple of nice birthday gifts to send back to Thailand. There is a decently-stocked (by Vietnam standards - it's no Toys R Us) toy store in this shopping plaza that's called "The Tax Centre". It's full of high-end cosmetics, wristwatches, and Renault automobiles on the ground floor, but it's more like loose stalls on the upper levels. 

As I circled the second and third floors on the way to the escalators to the top floor, my eyes focused only on my destination and not on anyone who might be staring at me in curiosity, it occured to me that I don't even notice anymore that I may be the only one who looks different in that place, the only foreigner. It makes me invisible, in an ironic way.

When I was a teenager and full of angst and largely repressed rage, I never thought about the future any deeper than twelve months out. I never thought that learning to navigate whatever crap I was given to deal with alone would ever be something that would serve me well, or be something that I might feel a few tinges of pride over, give or take twenty years. My status as an outcast and loner was very much forced upon me, and man, it sucked when I was fifteen.

But now, I think that I can cope with being different it now because I coped with it then. Not only that, I'm doing better this time around. I can walk around an overcrowded shopping plaza full of people that I can't even communicate with in a culture that I don't understand the unspoken rules of, and I don't care that I am different at all. 

 

drama queen

For many months, I'd been thinking that the film Tangled was near perfect, as far as Disney movies featuring princesses go. This is largely because I adore Donna Murphy and she rocks her scary-manipulative-mom song, but also because I love the spirit of adventure in the movie and that Rapunzel and Eugene are flawed and multi-dimensional characters. My three year-old loves Tangled as well, so much that she's taken to offering me her own dramatic rendition of the film as she follows the action on our small tv screen. 

This development started off rather sweetly; Sadie would run off to find a comb so that she could groom her (rather short-ish) hair at the same time that she watches Rapunzel do the same. She even shuffled over to me, holding a handful of her hair out for me to grab, and indicated that I could use it to speed up my entering and exiting of the tv room similar to Mother Gothel with Rapunzel's hair in the movie. I should have predicted that she'd want to hold my hands and stare into my eyes while the lanterns were floating around Rapunzel and Eugene in their rowboat on-screen. Her intensity was a bit unexpected, but Sadie's pretend play still struck me as charming.

Sadie's dramatics took a more daring turn this weekend, as the "I've Got a Dream" musical number in the Snuggly Duckling prompted her to jump up on our coffee table and dance sing along, complete with jazz hands and arm flourishes. Apparently, she's got dreams, too. And needs to sing about them.

Next, I saw that one of the windows in our family room was wide open. Those windows start at the floor and reach up to nearly the ceiling, and thus are covered by security bars. Everyone can easily reach through the bars to turn the lever and push the windows open, which Sadie apparently started doing, having noticed that no one uses a door in Rapunzel's tower - they climb in through the window, of course. The problem with this - well, one of many problems with Sadie playing with the windows - is that it's not manipulative parental figures that will come in through our open family room windows. It's going to be potentially tropical-disease-carrying mosquitos and other insects and small reptiles (and probaby not as friendly as Rapunzel's chameleon friend). The petty thieves around here who would love an open window are not as harmless as Eugene, so it's probably a good thing that those security bars are narrowly-spaced. Safety-wise, opening these windows could lead to curiosity about other windows in our house, and I don't want to go there.

This G-rated film is seriously starting to wreck some havoc on my home! I think that I need to put our pair of cast-iron frying pans into a locked cabinet before Sadie gets any ideas about arming herself like Rapunzel :)

 

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". 

 

 

the one where I talk about high school stuff

I have a few touchy subjects, I'll admit (but doesn't everyone?).

One of my friends called me out the other day, with a comment in email about how we've never talked much about what high school was like. High school for me was nothing like Beverly Hills 90210 (original version), which is what I imagined that it was actually supposed to be like, at least for teenagers with more of the right stuff than I had. I usually try not to remember it. 

Anyway, I took this was a challenge to come up with five good things to say about my time in high school. Here's the results:

5.  A Few Feats of Brainpower - I was an essay-writing machine in high school, thus scoring a 90 and a 93 on my twelve grade diploma exams in English and Social Studies, respectively, which was really cool. I studied my ass off for the same exam in math, and managed to get an 80, which seemed ridiculously unachieveable in a subject that I was nearly failing three years earlier. So, I was happy with myself in that regard. But the exam that I laugh about the most was my final exam in eleventh-grade chemistry. It was my second year with the same lousy teacher, and despite my perfect attendence and note-taking and studying, I honestly had little clue what the guy was trying to teach. The final exam was worth 30% of my final grade, and I realized two days before the test that I'd still pass the class if I scored a zero. So, I stopped studying for my chemistry final; it felt fruitless and I had another final later that day, where I probably could do well if I refocused my efforts. Know what? I was one of seven people in my chemistry class (there would have been about 28 students in it) who passed the final exam. Thank goodness for muliple choice. 

4. Eleventh Grade Biology - This tied for my favourite class in high school. I made quick friends with the guy sitting behind me, Steve, who told me tales of being on the football and rugby teams and his days at a french-language school in Ottawa before the bell would ring to signal the start of class. I've forgotten what I talked about. I remember thinking that his handwriting was really neat and he had excellent posture and really nice arms, so perhaps I was too busy studying him to be making witty conversation. By the end of the first month of school, Steve was totally my unrequited high school crush.  Biology was also a highlight because my teacher orchestrated some awesome field trips. We went to the Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller (which everyone had probably been to before, but probably not traveled to on a bus with friends and not a lot of supervision, which was just a lot of fun). We went to tour the Alberta Medical Examiner's Office, and we saw the refridgeration room where toe-tags peeked out on bodies that were awaiting their autopsies. 

3. Mr. McNeil, Social Studies Teacher and Great Orator - I was in Mr. McNeil's class for eleventh grade social studies. Even though I was sitting in a desk on the side of the room facing the windows overlooking the teachers' parking lot, it felt more like I was sitting in the audience of a dark theatre somewhere, watching a skilled actor soliloquise on Thomas Cromwell, the French Revolution, and occasionally, off-topic subjects like how he once managed to go into Zellers for a new watch battery and somehow left with a set of keys to the entire department store.  It was one of those classes that was a pleasure to go to, and I don't remember anyone skipping it. 

2. Advanced English in Gr. 11 - I guess that I loved my eleventh grade English class as much as I did Biology for many of the same reasons. I got to stare at and talk with my friend Steve again, and go on field trips. The field trips were one of the main appeals of the advanced class because the regular English classes didn't go on any. My teacher's name was Mr. G, and his passion for literature was so obvious when he was lecturing us on Beowulf and the poetry of John Donne. Having to talk to him one-on-one was really weird, though, because he was kind of stand-offish when he wasn't standing in the front of the classroom. We read Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer that year, and went to see it on stage at Edmonton's Citadel Theatre. I think that I had lunch out with Steve and two of the girls in our class before the play, and when the matinee started, we noticed that our teacher had snuck his boyfriend into the play. I didn't think of it at the time, but that might have been a bold thing to do twenty years ago, in 1992. The other field trip I took with my English class was to see a performance of Romeo and Juliet by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. I can't figure out why we went to see that, because we weren't studying the play in class, but I guess Mr. G just liked supporting the arts. It was cool, anyways. My favourite thing about my English class was reading The Lion in Winter by James Goldman. It started a several-years-long obsession with the Plantagenet kings for me. 

And the #1 best thing in high school was:

1. Science Jeopardy Day - one day during the last week of classes in eleventh grade biology, our teacher asked the class if we were interested in playing Science Jeopardy instead of spending another day studying the endocrine system or something like that. The response was positive, and I remember that he grinned before tapping a deck of trivia cards on his worktable and saying, "Good. We'll play Steve and Laura versus The Rest of the Class." It was so much fun! Steve was my only competition academically in the class, and he loved trivia nearly as much as I did. We managed to stay a couple of points ahead of the rest of the class by the time that bell rang, signalling the end of the period, and everyone seemed to have had a lot of fun. 

So, there. My five positive memories from high school. Maybe the next post here will be on topic - those kids of mine are supposed to be the protagonists around here!