If You're Going My Way...I Wanna Drive It All Night Long

Just lookit at what The Husband brought back for me from Canada!

Despite concerted and valiant efforts, I have yet to find decent substitutes for Fort Garry Dark and Sleeman Honey Brown down here. We can get close, but not quite. And we've yet to source Australian cookies here and thus must depend upon trips to The Real Canadian Superstore for TimTams. So seeing these boxes come through the door last night totally made my weekend.

Speaking of weekend, The Husband has elected not to guest post, so it's up to me to give you the Weekend Update on the road trip. By all accounts, it went well:

DVD player? Check. Movies from the library? Check.

Fuel-up stops by strangely-named gas stations? Check. (The Husband and I keep a running tally of these weird business names. Loaf'n'Jug is still the winner, but Kum'n'Go is a pretty close second.)

Chillin' at the Steinbach Summer in the City Festival? Check.

MEETING TOM COCHRANE?! Check and double-check.

We've got some serious conn-eck-shuns that orchestrated a meeting between the rocker and the groupie. The Husband got home totally pumped. There was chatting. There was a CD signing (signed "Your friend, Tom Cochrane." That's right - your FRIEND).

Aaaand, The Husband got to request a song, and apparently his choice was the final song of the evening that was then dedicated to "[The Husband], who came all the way from Minneapolis."

It's like a Canadian version of Almost Famous. Except The Husband doesn't go on the road. Or meet Penny Lane. Or grow up to be Cameron Crowe. Otherwise - exactly the same.

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Sunday Seven - Special Father's Day Edition!

I am a bad daughter, sometimes. I totally take for granted my great parents and routinely and blithely disregard the fifth commandment by forgetting to include them in my "List of Things I'm Thankful For."

This is partly because, well, they're always there. In the background. There when I need them, keeping a respectful distance when I don't. Kinda like the sound technician in church: if he's doing his job, no one notices or cares.

(Of course, one squawk from a microphone and the entire congregation swivels around as one to see who is on sound today? It's a thankless job.)

But given that it's that time of year again when we are reminded that it's a thankless job, and I can't think of anything cooler than being recognized on this here small corner of the Internets, I give you:

Top 7 Ways My Dad is Awesome:

1. Fries with gravy. I didn't hang out one-on-one with my Dad all that much, which made our little dates all the more special. One time, he took me to Uncle Jake's at the mall and we ordered fries with gravy. I'd never had them before, and I was stunned by the goodness. All that carby, fatty, salty amazingness. He also taught me to add a little sweetness to the mix by squeezing on some ketchup. It's because of that day that I had fries and gravy and ketchup at least three times a week all through high school.

2. The dump. Saturday morning was reserved for sugared cereal and cartoons at our house. But Dad was up with the birds, working around the house and the yard. The only thing that could tear us away from the TV was him yelling down the stairs, "anyone wanna go to the dump?" Would we?! We flew up the stairs in our pajamas and piled into the blue '78 Oldsmobile Omega and bounced in our seats all the way to the dump where we found all sorts of cool things like burnt salad dressing bottles and dolls with no heads. Once, Yenno found a garbage bag filled with maggots. Oh yes.

3. The farm. My dad didn't have an awful lot growing up. But one thing he did have was the farm. It was a play farm, the barn made of metal, with all sorts of twee little animals. It had fences. And watering troughs. It was hidden away most of the time, but every winter, when we'd exhausted our parents with our energy and there was a fire in the woodstove making everything lovely and cozy, he'd bring out the farm for an evening of magical play.

4. Worship leading. Church was a pretty big deal when I was a kid. Our lives - religious and social - revolved around its weekly rhythm. I got used to my parents being gone a lot of evenings, but it didn't ever really occur to me that they were Serving the Lord. But one thing I loved was when my Dad was the worship leader. It was such an important job - directing the Sunday service, telling people where to find the hymn numbers, even praying. I'd get all fluttery with pride when I saw my dad up there.

5. The shelf. My dad is pretty handy. His favourite thing to build is shelves. Free-standing, attached to the wall, hinged so they fold up like a Murphy's Bed - they're all great as far as he is concerned. (This is because he is a bit of a pack rat. He keeps everything because it might be useful one day. I have only ever seen it happen once, where he needed something, disappeared into the garage for half an hour, and emerged triumphant, holding the bolt up to the sky in victory, declaring that he had had this for fifteen years and it was a good thing he kept it.)

Anyway, when we were young, we did a lot of driving out to BC where we had some fantabulous family. To keep us occupied pre-DVD days, he built a folding shelf to use as a drawing table that hung from the back of the front seat and hinged up when we were napping. It was amazing. He even painted it blue to match our car. Never mind that if we were in an accident while it was down we would have been sliced in half. It was still pretty wicked.

6. Mr. Mom. Our family was pretty traditional - Dad worked and Mom stayed at home with us. They each had their areas of expertise and divided up the duties nicely. But every so often Mom would go away for a week to visit our fantabulous family in BC, and Dad had to do double duty. On one such trip, I came down with scarlet fever. My memories of that time are mostly of itching, but I remember my Dad taking me to the doctor and then, after observing me trying to itch my back without breaking the skin by sliding up and down on the carpet, bringing me a one-foot square piece of rug that I could take around with me like my own personal scratching post. That is some solid parental care right there.

7. Grandpa. My Dad loves my kids. When The Boy was little, he refused a food source that wasn't warm, squishy, and attached to his mommy, so if I had to go out for the evening, my dad would hold that crying little boy in the rocking chair, turn on some hockey (because that was the sport that seemed to work the best) and spend over an hour patiently trying to get him to drink from a bottle. When I visited my dad at work with an infant The Girl, he pretty much burst his buttons with pride showing her off. He has taken those kids on more chariot rides behind his bicycle than can be counted. It's pretty great as a daughter watching your dad love on your kids.

Happy Father's Day, Dad!

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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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