Well, the weather hasn't co operated that much this winter. This winter has been almost as good as the summer was, which is my way of saying that it has been one of the worst I can remember! Terrible! Where is the ice? Where is the snow? I've pulled my shovel out once so far this winter. Once! And it was a pity pull. There was only about an inch of snow, it would have melted by the following afternoon but my shovel was starting to look lonely and forlorn in the back of my shed behind the bikes so I thought I would get it out, let it see the sunlight and the sky, remember its rightful place in the universe.
I love my shovel. I love shoveling. Every winter Kurtis and I fight over who gets to do the shoveling at our house. I love shoveling so much that I will put a twenty five pound baby on my back in our baby trekker and shovel the driveway, just to make sure that I get the job done before Kurtis gets home because otherwise I know I will have to share.
But this year there has been no snow to shovel and very little ice. However, the kids did get about a week to take advantage of the work Kurtis did in the back yard this year.
The rink took several weeks to perfect, the kids loved for about a week and a half and now it sits, runny and bumpy and soft as an August slushy in some places, waiting for the next big freeze.
I had my first rehearsal of the year on Sunday. It felt good to sing a little, to talk about gigs, potential and booked, to think about music and new directions to take, and costumes and characters and muppets. Yep, muppets.
Somehow it came up that most of the band had never seen the Jim Henson Memorial and, despite the fact that it took place almost twenty years ago, there's a video of it on You Tube, like many other wonderful videos that don't involve gratuitous cat injuries, terrible acoustic versions of Coldplay songs or stupid human tricks...oh wait...I'm in one of those.
So we watched it. and we were all sniffling by the end. It's amazing how much of the sound track of my childhood is contained in music made by large puppets. Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and Fraggle Rock, all taught me songs that I can still remember the words to now. Songs that still affect me, obviously, because the tears running down my face at the end of the Memorial Medley were pretty uncontrollable.
And the real kicker? The coup de gras? At the end of the last song, all of the muppets come out to sing and the five year old boy who was watching it with us kept naming the ones that he recognized.
"I see Fozzie and Gonzo!"
"Look, I see Oscar and Prairie Dawn and Elmo!
"There's Telly!"
And at the end, as the camera pulled back on all the singing muppets, he said
"But where's Kermit?"
And he reduced a room full of adults to full on sobs. Yeah, you don't know how much effort it cost me not to blurt out
"Kermit's dead, kid! Kermit's dead!"
I would recommend watching the entire memorial medley sometime. It's on you tube in two parts and in total it's about fifteen minutes long but it is so worth it.
Today, Leo told me that he loved me so much that "when we die, at the end of days, I will let you lie down beside me so that we will never be alone."
Um...End of Days?? Surely, they're not teaching him that at the Catholic School are they? I mean they couldn't.
Could they?
i think I'm going to chalk it up to Aidan's obsession with the Mayan calendar and disaster movies. Maybe Leo has picked it up from one of Aidan's many dinner time conversations. That's the thing about having an enthusiastic ten year old at the dinner table, they do tend to monopolize the conversation. When we aren't being enthralled by recitations of the millions of evolutions of all of the pokemon in each region, we are being inundated with stories of destruction and solar flares. Maybe Leo has been paying closer attention than it seemed.
Even still, I'm going to give the posters in his classroom a closer look tomorrow when we have our parent teacher interviews. I'll be on the lookout for any and all quotes from revelations or any particularly suspicious advertisements for kool-aid.
Last night I festooned the house with our advent chains and hung up the chocolate advent calendars. And, yes, for the entire month of November I entertained visions of creating heirloom quality advent calendars from upcycled, felted wool sweaters and old socks. But instead I hung up two $1.69 Zellers specials, the ones covered in pictures of Marvel Superheroes and filled with fingernail sized, waxy chocolate squares.
First thing this morning, Aidan and Leo each ate their chocolate (before breakfast, what kind of mother am I?)and opened their chains. We made the paper chains I remember from my childhood. There are 24 links and each link contains a secret message, something Christmasy that has to be done that day. It's like your secret agent Christmas orders for the day. Today's task was to decorate the house. So, after school,I dragged out the Christmas decorations from the basement: the wind up Santa statue that plays Silent Night that Kurtis' mom gave us a few years ago, the china penguins that huddle around the warmth of a candle flame, holding out their flippers like movie set homeless men, warming up by a garbage can fire, the Christmas kissing ball and the drunken salt dough snowmen that Aidan and I made when he was five, who always look like they may not make it home from the bar.
Leo was so excited by it all. He loved finding places to hang wreaths. He loved positioning the penguins and playing with the knitted Santa elephants. He must have wound the Santa statue forty five times, the tinny notes of Silent Night are still ringing in my ears. He did get a little carried away with the drunken snowmen and one of them suffered a slight mishap, losing the tip of his carrot nose. I'm telling myself that it adds to their charm.
And that's what I love about Christmas. Somehow, the haphazard, slightly hacky aspect of our lives gains a magical quality. It sounds hokey, I know, but in December all the things I might normally blush about or try to nudge under the rug with my toe; the flour on the counter tops, the bits of glitter glue and paint smeared across my kitchen floor, the piles of scrap paper and trash bag wreaths, all of those things are suddenly elevated to the realm of the touching and thoughtful. The slapdash suddenly becomes homey and sweet. The tackiness turns into enthusiasm. It all gets so much more meaning at Christmas.
We got our tree tonight. It's lying down, wrapped in a garbage bag, on our porch along with an explosion of paper snowflakes that we stuck up with masking tape last year and never managed to take down. I wonder if our neighbours appreciate my definition of Christmas as much as I do. I do know that the kids still get the magic, even the tacky magic. I caught Leo staring at his Spiderman advent calendar before he went up to bed tonight. He kissed it and whispered "I love you".
So, I know it's a little early for this post but, considering the way I've been about keeping up with this blog, it's more than likely that by the time I write my next post this title will be entirely appropriate.
I've made a lot of new years resolutions in my life. I've promised to eat less candy, eat less in general, go to the gym more, play on the floor more, tidy up more often, yell at my kids less often, be grateful, do more crafts, practice my guitar, and write in my blog every day. That was my resolution last year. I was going to write in this blog every day. Perhaps you can see where this is going? I suck at resolutions. Consistency and commitment have never been my strong points.
Yesterday, Leo asked me why he has to go to school. We have some friends down the street that are homeschoolers and Leo is very jealous of the cozy nature of their days. I told him that he had promised Miss Cifani that he would come to her class when he signed up and that when you say that you are going to do something you have to stick to it. If only I could learn that lesson myself.
Leo is still not sure about school. I think he's only attended about half of the days that he was supposed to. He's been sick (he was oinking with the H1N1 for awhile) or he's been tired or he's been angry and he tells me that Miss Cifani doesn't like him to "bring his angry to school". Obviously the only logical option on angry days is for Leo to stay home because, as he says, how could he leave his anger at home? It's inside him!
He is, however, doing a lot better than Aidan did in kindergarten. Aidan cried every morning until just before Christmas break and then he started up again, crying every day after Christmas break right through to February. I remember riding my bike to class in tears, after leaving him sobbing on his classroom carpet. I think his attendance was about 25% in jk and only marginally better in kindergarten. Actually, come to think of it, it's only marginally better than that now. It amazes me that he does as well as he does. I think he misses more days than he goes.
I wish I had the kind of self sacrificing nature that would allow me to home school my children. But I like my little life too much: my habits and hobbies and the things that make me me. I like having time to read my books, time to take pictures, time to sing and act and bake cookies and spend time in my own head, preferably at coffee shops with large caramel covered coffee drinks...although obviously not time to write in my blog...or tidy up...or play the guitar. Can you see how dusty that case is?
We spent some time at Sandbanks Provincial Park last week. It's an annual tradition for my family and all of my cousins and aunts and uncles usually show up for a little bit. My brothers were MIA this year but the boisterous presence of my children more than made up for it. We were walking back from the washrooms one night and my mother asked me if I ever felt like I inhabited my own private little tornado of sound. Well, mom, I do. Every day.
Russell is a full fledged toddler now and by the end of the week he was walking like a pro over both the rough terrain of an uneven campsite and the soft sand of the beach. I can't wait for this next stage. The next couple of years are my favourite years: the walking, the talking, the independence and the new little personality that develops over the next two or three years. It's all so exciting. My uncle made his annual sandcastle. Unfortunately, I didn't get any good shots of the finished product but here's one of the construction. Of course, the boys made one too. Although, as usual, it was a little difficult to get the concepts of the nine year old to jibe with the capabilities of the four year old.
Leo was often relegated to water duty. And the highlight of my week was definitely seeing Kurtis in his element once more. Give that guy a camp chair, a beer, a fire and a baby to hold and you give him bliss.
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