Vendredi V - High School Musical Edition

It's EstrogenFest at the PM house this weekend. Right after lunch today, The Husband and The Boy left for some solid man-bonding time on their road trip up to Steinbach.

And why, you might ask, are they heading back to Steinbach for the weekend?

If you're a local resident, you already know the answer to this question: Tom Cochrane (recently-announced inductee into the Canadian Walk of Fame!) is playing an outdoor concert in the Extra Foods parking lot at the Steinbach summer festival tomorrow night.

And, if you know The Husband at all, you will know that one of his favouritest artists of all time is Mr. Cochrane. As soon as he heard about the concert last weekend, he was immediately making plans to head up for it.

So, of course, we've had the all-Tommy-all-the-time music channel going at our house this week. It totally takes me back, since Tom Cochrane was all the rage back when I was in high school. And it gets me into the mood for:

Top 5 Songs from My High School Days Soundtrack

1. "Life is a Highway" Natch. The first gift I ever bought for The Husband was this CD, back when we had been dating for six weeks. I may or may not have been fourteen, and it is entirely possible that my mother drove me to St. Vital mall to look for the perfect gift for my boyfriend. It was, indeed, the perfect gift. He popped it into the Prelude's CD player, and listened to it constantly. As in "how many times can I play Life is a Highway between my house and McDonald's" constantly.

2. "Everything I Do (I Do It For You)" You know, I never quite understood the parentheses in that song title. Is it supposed to be optional? Some sort of an aside? But what I did understand was that this song, its release coinciding so nicely with my attendance at Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (again with the superfluous punctuation!) at the King's Theatre movie cinema in Steinbach with my almost-sorta-might-be-my-boyfriend (he of the above) along with a group of friends, was totally our song.

3. "Dance a Cachuca" When I was in grade 12, our music teacher decided we had the magical combination of enough strong voices in various parts. We did The Gondoliers that year, much to the jealousy of the previous year who had to do Bye Bye Birdie. [snicker] We actually hired a choreographer from The Big City and I got to be a principal dancer. It can't have been because of my coordination, given that I was routinely called "Wookie-Girl" in those days, but perhaps my teacher whispered a kind word for me in her ear since all my friends had real parts and I was still in the chorus.

4. "Witness" Music was a huge part of my life in high school. Not content with attending twice-daily choir/ensemble rehearsals, dropping French so I could be in said rehearsals, and hanging out in the choir room so much that we didn't bother going to our lockers and just left our crap in the practice rooms, some friends and I formed a touring musical group. We toured each other's churches. We called ourselves "Witness." We were convinced we were The Awesome.

5. "The River" Grad songs are such a huge deal. What you choose defines your year. It will forever remind you of the bittersweetness of leaving behind one's youth and facing the Real World ahead, of saying goodbye to friends you likely won't see again. (Except maybe at Extra Foods in two years.) Due to some serious vote-splitting, our year somehow chose Ramble On (is that Led Zeppelin? I don't even know).

It was a terrible song. We who had not voted for it were angry. So we hijacked the evening, and convinced our music teacher that instead of the traditional "small group of elite grade 12 choir singers" performing a choir song, a group consisting of four grade eleven boys (hey, they were all our dates), one not-in-choir-but-was-totally-gonna-make-it-as-a-country-music-star-guitar-playing-soloist, and a few actual graduates would perform one of the runner-up songs.

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Vendredi V - Memory Lane Edition

I was going through some old pics this week and I realized once again what a terrible mother I am. Not "terrible" as in somebody call CFS but "terrible" as in sigh, yet another thing my kids will need therapy for.

This particular $150/hr session will deal with their disappointment in my failure to record important milestones. Oh, I've got baby books. But they're mostly blank. Ask me when the first teeth came or when they started walking, and I haven't a clue. When did they start sleeping through the night? Darned if I know.

Basically from the moment the doctor unhinged my entire existence by declaring "It's a Girl!", parenting has been a blur. Who has time to lovingly craft scrapbooks and painstakingly write down each spoonful of peas and each successful trip to the potty when one barely has enough brain cells to remember to wear matching shoes?

Thank goodness for pictures, then. They jog my memory and bring moments from that blur into sharp focus. They remind me of:

Top 5 Things I've Forgotten About My Munchkins:

1. They once grew inside me. I can barely remember pregnancy. I mostly remember being tired. I also remember sitting in the bathtub in my final days (which I thought were my final weeks), watching my stomach heave as my baby moved. I'm pretty sure I could see an elbow work its way across my belly.

2. The Boy was so fat. Seriously, if you would have told me that when he was in kindergarten I'd be looking for the "slim" jeans and being thankful for those elastic waist-cincher thingeys, I wouldn't have believed you. He almost doubled his weight by the time he was two months, and he spent most of his first year entirely off the charts. I remember how excited we were when he got back on them and was only 99th percentile!

3. They've always been two peas in a pod. They often seem so different - the one is all caped crusader craziness and the other is intense artistic emo. But really, when you get down to it, they're cut from the same cloth.

4. She's not always angry. She can be so intense, that sometimes all I remember are the storms. But the calm times in between are so sunny, they make up for it.

5. No really, he was SO fat.

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In Which I Am Reminded Why I Am Not a Stay-At-Home Mom

"Be good for Mom," said The Husband as he left for work on Monday, his voice combining both exhortation to behave well and a low-level threat about what might happen if they didn't.

School's out, but daycare isn't in session yet, so the kids and I have been driving each other insane enjoying some quality time in this purgatory nice little break between the two.

Now, if I were that Mom, this would be great. I'd have hit Michael's and bought some craft supplies, I'd have fun, new kid-friendly recipes so we could take some fresh-baked treats over to our new neighbours, and I'd have my active-wear jeans ready to go for some super-fun games at the park.

We'd be having so much fun that we'd totally forget we even have a TV, and we'd look up from our tenth happy round of Junior Monopoly with astonishment that it was already 6:00 when The Husband walked in, sniffing appreciatively the homemade lasagna all bubbly and gooey with cheese in the oven.

Riiiiiight.

Seeing as how I am decidedly NOT that Mom, our days have consisted mostly of watching TV (the kids), catching up on some projects around the house (me), and whining (all of us).

"Moooo-ooom, I'm BORED!"

"Moooo-ooom, I'm HUNGRY!"

"How come you guys are always watching TV. Turn that thing off. [....] I don't care if you're bored, I am not a social convener. And yes, computer and DSs both count as screen time."

Doesn't help that it's been raining for three days straight, so we're trying to figure out stuff to do inside. Or that yesterday afternoon, the first time the drizzle let up, I proved I was Awesome Mom.

I'd wondered idly where The Boy was, having sent him to go ride his bike around the block awhile back. Then he showed up, wearing his pajamas with the skeleton on them (he was Skeleton Kid, caped crusader) helmet hanging down his back with the strap tight around his neck, all of it tangled up in a blanket.

"Mom, I was riding my bike and then my cape got caught in my wheels and it was choking me a bit and then a van with a girl in it stopped and then another van with a girl in it stopped and then they had to help me get my cape out of my wheels."

Although I suppose this isn't so much an indictment of my parenting skills as it is a demonstration that Edna Moon was totally right in The Incredibles:

NO CAPES!

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A Song Request Overheard

The Boy: Hey Dad, can I listen to you play bass?

The Husband: Sure, buddy. What would you like to hear?

The Boy: Do you know the one "there once was a little kid who had a small sheep?"

The Husband: Um, you mean Mary Had a Little Lamb?

The Boy: Yeah, that one.

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Vendredi V - School's Out! Edition

Among the things that America does better than Canada (Netflix! Chipotle! Target!) is its designation of school levels. In Canada, you've got the oh-so-cumbersome I'm in grade one. Which works fine, until you are talking about said child and you have to call him a kid in grade one or grade one-er.

In America, it's all about the first grade and third grade; I'm in first grade isn't particularly easier than I'm in grade one, but when it comes to parental bragging, I've got a first grader and a third grader trip off the tongue much more easily.

Unless, of course, these things are true. In which case, there are no words, but merely an astonished gasp.

And they are true. School ended today and, as confirmed by their report cards, my munchkins are officially in first and third grades respectively. This is, of course, clear evidence of a rift in the time/space continuum as this actually happened only yesterday, and I heard the doctor exclaim, "It's a boy!" a mere two days ago and "It's a girl!" the day right before that.

Not surprising, then, that it feels like it was last week that I came running down Third Street, breathless with excitement that my own elementary school was out for the summer. The holidays beckoned, eight whole weeks ready to be filled with:

Top 5 Best Parts of Summer Holidays

1. Homemade popsicles. Did your mom make these? Mine did. It can't have been a cost-savings, since popsicles cost something like four cents. These contained some magical elixir made of carefully measured proportions of Kool-Aid and Jello and were molded in Dixie cups, with popsicle sticks stuck in at exactly the right moment of viscosity. They tasted amazing and, best of all, she would make them with different layers. Lime and cherry, ohhhhhh yeah.

2. Going to the library. Finally, no school to interfere with the best part of life. I'd put a cardboard box on my wagon, trundle it down to the library two blocks away, and fill the box with books. One year I got in trouble with the librarians because I read and returned most of the books on the same day I took them out, and they were none to pleased to have to re-shelve books whose spots were only recently-vacated.

3. Red Rock Bible Camp. Despite an only partially-successful first year in which I spent a good part of it crying for my mummy, I grew to love my annual week at camp. And what wasn't to love? I took Arts & Crafts and Music (hello! geek skills!) except for the years I broke it up with Fishing (which was fine, since we always went out in the heat of the afternoon and didn't have to catch anything). I retched a couple of times on the first day in order to successfully escape plate scraping duty (those coffee cans and spatulas clunked unceremoniously at the end of the table after a meal? Grossest thing ever). There was always a cute counselor to have a crush on. But my real crush was on Jesus. As much as adult Christianity is rewarding, it's hard; some days, I'd give anything to be be back in in that black and white world, where I was in looooooooove with Jesus, singing love songs to him around the campfire.

4. Painting the garage. Our garage doors were made out of red metal, and, when they (and my mom) got super-hot, she'd send us out with pails of water and paint brushes to make water-darkened pictures on the scalding metal. The pictures dried in minutes, so we had a blank canvas all afternoon long. She was smart, and we were losers, and everyone was happy.

5. Leathery feet. It was always a shock to run barefoot around the block for the first time after school was out; the feet in my memory were those from the end of the past summer, toughened by eight weeks of tearing around after friends, bikes, and dogs. Didn't take long, though - by mid-July my jelly shoes were somewhere in the back of the closet and my nightly ablutions consisted mostly of scraping the dirt off my feet.

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You Take the Good, You Take the Bad

Whew! It's busy these days over at the ol' Bringing-Home-the-Bacon Factory. Not as bad as last year, but it's definitely the high stress point of my annual work cycle.

In addition to the overtime, I had to skip my lunch-hour yoga class today. Again. Third week in a row. Kind of a dumb thing to do, I know, since I need it more these days than usual, but it's tough to downward dog your way to peace when you're thinking of the extra time you'll need to put in that night because you took an hour out for yoga. It's also kind of dumb since I pay a flat rate, so my cost per session is mounting, but at least I'm supporting my yoga teacher's biking trip to Costa Rica.

[Aside: This is not entirely unprecedented. In a feat of spectacularly poor scheduling, I once signed up for a $110 10-session ball-rolling class and was able to attend only the first class. I still have the cruddy old demonstration ball I received with promises that I could trade it in for my own personal fancy shiny one at the next class I attended. Given its cost-per-use ratio, that dang ball beats my fancy treadmill hands down as The Most Expensive Piece of Exercise Equipment I Own.]

Apparently my brain has room only for one thing at one time these days, too. I tried to use someone's business card for a bus ticket the other day. Then on Sunday night, I somehow set my alarm wonky so I ended up getting up at 4:50 am instead of 5:50 am (on Monday morning, no less!) and only realized it when I was dressed and staring with confusion at the clock on the microwave.

[Seriously. That's TWO Daylight Saving spring-forwards for 2009. It is my most hated day of the year and I have to have TWO?!]

Things could be worse, though. I could be that guy whose car was on fire on the freeway shoulder this morning. Or one of the people in the Honda Accord I was following home today that had eight passengers in it. (I wouldn't have thought it possible myself, unless I had counted heads.)

Plus, I'm taking advantage of the beautiful day and biking down to the lake this evening where I'll meet a friend for a walk. (Biking! Walking! Lake! Friend-with-a-Minnesota-zip-code!]

And, super treat last night - I got to witness the birth of a praise band. Well, "band" is a bit generous. A girl from church invited interested folks to join her for a jam night, and the Peitricia Mae clan attended in full force. The Husband has been learning bass guitar in the hopes of just such an event, and did superbly (even sight-read!). I indulged in some alto, and The Boy played the bongos. He's not a huge lover of the actual beat, but does a fantastic job at filling in the empty space around it. The Girl was busy with crafts and presented each band member with a personalized paper box.

So all in all, I'd say we're looking at a slight net positive for the week. And we haven't even hit Chipotle on Friday yet!

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