Goofy *Updated

Our pumpkins this year. It was a big job, but we got 'er done.  K2's is on the left and mine is on the right.

*We bought 200 chocolates for tonight and just ran out.  Kids are still out and about in this neighbourhood.  Crazy!!

**We had several inquiries as to whether or not we were a couple of dentists!  Ha Ha! 

***We were spooked when G-Man and my brother came by for some scary tricks!

Tricks and Treats

Do you remember your high school Halloween dances? Hundreds of sweaty kids in more make-up than Tammy Fae Baker sweating up a hormonal storm in a very moist gymnasium?

Good times.

I chaperoned our school's Halloween Dance last night and man, did it bring back a flood of memories to be there. There were some very fun costumes and some very embarrassing dancing (particularly by the football players who, although they have all the moves on the field, know nothing about moves on the dance floor).

Four of our senior students (well respected members of the school community, I might add) showed up at the doors completely stoned and reeking of p*t and alcohol. There are always two police officers who are hired by the school for the night and upon giving them notice, the foursome were quickly retained, parents called and suspensions given. I watched, with some satisfaction/empathetic humiliation, as each parent walked through the doors to pick up their children from two very gruff looking police officers. I suppose these kids will have a very long weekend ahead. Each of the students can say goodbye to their student cabinet positions and, as they head off to university next year, they will do so without the references they had anticipated from the administration.

Good times.

K2 and I have our pumpkins primed and ready to carve later today. As if I have to get through a whole work day before the fun of Halloween can begin!

Have a great Friday!

Every. Single. Day.

The Blueberry Bear turned 12 in August and he is just as feisty as he was when he was a little. In many respects, he still believes that he is a kitten and I'm totally fine with that.

We have every toy known to humans and have invested a small fortune on the latest cat-nippy gadget for Bear, but his addiction to balls in shoes is still going strong. Every single day, when I get home from work, we have to break out the balls and my old Doc Martens for a little hunt. I don't know why.

This was back in March of 2007...his version of the Easter Egg Hunt.



And this was taken just a few moments ago. It is the cutest thing...a little weird too, right?




**No judgment. Until we have children, pictures and video of Bear will grace this blog. He's all we've got.

Six Random Things

High on Craft tagged me for this one.  I don't typically do tags, but since she is my best friend, I thought I would play along.  Besides, I have a bit of bloggers' block, so this is a good excuse to write.

Six Random Things About Me:

1.  Fingernails bug me.  I cut mine down to stubs because the sensation of having them grow longer than my fingers completely grosses me out.  When I see women with long nails - I get freaked out.  I tremble inside when people pick at their nails, play with them or rub them along paper.  It's the stuff of nightmares.

2.  I'm a vegetarian and have been for 12 years.  It's not a result of a moral code of ethics or anything like that.  I got food poisoning on New Year's Eve (on the cusp of 1997) from pork souvlaki.  I thought I was going to die that night. Meat?  No thank you.

3.  Mushrooms make me gag.  My mom used to fry mushrooms in butter and my reaction to the smell of it was such that I had to stand outside until the scent cleared the house.  To this day, I cannot smell mushrooms frying without dry heaving.  My best friend is now using a Mushroom as a logo for her new shop.

4. I am addicted to information - I am a news junkie.  I prefer news radio to music.

5.  I regret removing my nose ring a couple of summers ago and letting the hole close.  I went through a lot of pain to have it done (twice because the first guy messed it up) and I wish I would have kept it now.

6.  I stand at a solid 5'7, yet I have to buy skirts and capris in the Petite section because my legs are so short.  My torso is freakishly long.

There you have it!  I think that everyone in the blog community has likley done this one, but if you haven't, please do and leave me a comment to tell me that you have.

I Made Pumpkin Loaf...No, Really!

I did it! I actually followed a recipe and made something that people actually enjoyed eating.

A couple of days ago, I wandered over to Sandra's Blog and saw that she had made a gorgeous Pumpkin Loaf for her family. It looked amazing and I decided to throw caution to the wind and try to whip up a batch (can loaves be considered batches?) all by myself. Those of you who know me, know that I can only make cereal, toast and rice, so mixing and measuring is HUGE for me.

The event was not without a massive mistake. I had just measured out the three cups of sugar and had put in the 3 and 1/3 cups of flour (which was a small mistake to begin with) when I realized that instead of putting in two teaspoons of cinnamon, I had put in two teaspoons of chili pepper. Sigh. I had to throw out that batch and start anew.

The final result was something of which K2, G-Man and my brother each enjoyed two helpings. Nice, eh? Okay, so my brother and K2 could have been stroking my ego by asking for two helpings, but a four year old? Not likely. I think they really liked it!

Thanks, Sandra for this great recipe and for building my culinary confidence!

Two Loaves Made

 

 G-Man enjoying his first slice...look at that grin!

 

I'm sending one loaf home to you, Mom and Dad!  Hope you enjoy it!

Good Old Catholic Guilt

Our high school boasts a stellar senior football team that has captured many championships in the last few years.  All of the classes I teach are senior classes and within those classes are approximately 15 of the senior football players.  Over the past couple of weeks, more and more of my boys have been asking me to go to the games to watch them play.  I always tell them that they will never know if I am there or not, since they are all so involved in playing and since there are usually so many people there.  They typically wave their hands at me in playful disappointment, but are always very polite about the whole thing.  Today, in all three classes, every single player asked me (again) if I would come out tonight at eight o'clock to watch them play.  Eight.  O'clock.  Like, in the evening.  On a Thursday night...after I have been sick with a cold for a week.  After I have been feeling plenty sorry for myself for several different reasons. 


At 7:45pm, the guilt made me layer on the warmest clothes I could find (it's a chilly 3 degrees Celsius - 37 degrees Fahrenheit), find all of our winter mittens and toques, and convince K2 to accompany me into the city to watch my boys play.  We sat out in the cold for over two hours watching the boys get slammed into the ground, get tackled by the other team, and, finally, saw them win 15-9.  The biggest surprise?  I had a nice time.  There were lots of team fans, some teachers and our principal and two VPs as well.  K2 snapped this grainy picture of the team and, though it's not a great one, I'm glad I have it.  Tomorrow, I will be able to tell my boys how proud I am of them...right after I wring their necks for scaring me so much on the field.  Those hits were tough, man.

No Sunshine and Rainbows Here...

I'm in this space right now; this space of being a childless mother. Losing three babies in less than a year has had an effect on me that I cannot describe.  I won't even try.  I found an excerpt of something I had written in May in an attempt to journal my last loss:

I spent most of today in bed. I did not sleep, but stared at the ceiling, the walls, the blankets and listened to my own heartbeat through the pillows. I closed my eyes and felt currents in my fingers and toes, I opened my eyes and stared into the red-hued aura of our room and I wished I could lay there for years. I was acutely aware of the warmth of the blood between my legs, of the dull ache of my contracting uterus, and of the passage of time clicking away in the backdrop of the three alarm clocks in our room. Acutely aware of the solitude. I was no longer two, but one. Will I ever be two again?

In some ways, I am stuck in that moment of death.  Moving forward with the kind of hope I used to carry within me so easily is difficult.  It's a daily, sometimes minute by minute, effort to stay head above water.  Articles like the one below help me to feel less alone than I typically feel.  I hate that other women have had to endure what I have, but there is a comfort and validation in these words that empowers me to keep kicking against the current of loss and fear. 

A Planet of Pain, Where No Words Are Quite Right
Published: October 20, 2008

There are no pink ribbons to wear if you’ve had a miscarriage, no walkathons or T-shirts to encourage awareness and prevention. And to the extent that we have a language to talk about miscarriage, it’s full of airy platitudes: “Don’t worry, I had one once, too,” or “I had two, and then — poof — Davey was born, and he’s graduating from college this week.”

But until you belong to the imaginary club of Mothers Without Children, it is a secret planet of pain, all but invisible to the outside world.

I recently had my third miscarriage in a year. It happened early in the pregnancy, and it was dismissed as no big deal — “chemical pregnancy” seems to be the term of art. Let’s not overreact, no need for hysterics, keep moving. “We’ll treat it as though you’re just getting your period,” as my doctor put it.

But honestly, it is not just like getting your period. Psychologically, of course, it is nothing like it, but physically it is different, too. I had cramps for hours that left my ribs feeling bruised, and then four days later I was back at work and exhausted because I was still bleeding a lot — not an alarming amount, but enough to make me schedule meetings in rooms near bathrooms, and to send me home in the afternoon for a two-hour nap. I wonder how men would cope. All of the pain, mess, furtive tidying-up, shame and soldiering-on seem so fundamentally female to me.

People act as if a miscarriage were a locatable event on a calendar, with a beginning, a middle and an end. But in fact it starts when you feel that first unmistakable twinge that something is totally wrong. It continues through the rough days of sorrow and deep cramps, and then it meanders through every single day of the rest of your whole stupid life. I will probably mourn about this miscarriage in some outwardly unremarkable way until I either have a healthy baby or die.

Talking about miscarriages is so loaded and pitiful and hushed and fraught with meaning about age and usefulness. It feels as though having three miscarriages in a year means I did something wrong, when the reality is that most miscarriages take place for chromosomal reasons out of our control.

Yet a woman who has had a miscarriage has likely asked herself why. “God must not want me to have a kid,” she might think, or “I am too old.” There are moments when you can feel that the miscarriage and the calamities of the world are your own doing and you should have somehow known better.

Maybe we don’t talk about our miscarriages because we don’t want women with children looking at us with pity, or teenagers in their immortality-flushed way thinking, “That’ll never happen to me.” We do not want happy families to whisper, “Thank God that’s not us.” We don’t want to wonder if men are thinking, “If they can’t have kids, then why are they here, anyway?”

I cannot tell you, though, what you should say to women who have had miscarriages. While it can be touching to hear other women’s stories, it can also be irritating: it makes our moment of extraordinary sadness feel ordinary and unremarkable. Why would I want to hear about your miscarriage when I am lying on the floor trying to lift 500 pounds of failure, disappointment and crashing hormones off my chest?

I can tell you that I want people to know. I don’t want it to be a secret or a shadow or something that is endured only alone. I want people to know that I have been through something, that I am tired but optimistic, that I’ve been knocked down but don’t help me up because I can get up myself.

It’s fair, I think, to want witnesses for our suffering. But with the sorrow also comes hope. And after all, we are resilient creatures. A friend of mine said it well in an e-mail message after she heard my news. “I hope you don’t give up,” she wrote. “I want to take a picture of your child one day against the tallest sunflower.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAN!!!

We are blessed to have you in our lives and to be able to call you friend. Hope your day is as wonderful and as special as you are.

Inevitable

Every single person at Thanksgiving dinner last weekend was sick...except K2 and me.

Incubation period for whatever-the-heck is now in my throat and sinuses...five days.

Good times.

The sun is shining here in Toronto today. Hope you and yours can enjoy a little of its warmth.

Infant Loss and Miscarriage Remembrance Day

"How did you spend your weekend?" She asked, sidling up to her colleague in the quiet halls of a school set to explode with a thousand students.

"The beautiful weather made it almost impossible to stay indoors, so we spent a lot of time outside hiking in some of the conservation areas just outside of town." She replied, eyes focused on the pattern on the tiles running up the stairs as they walked in unison now.

"You single couples. Man, what I wouldn't give to have an ounce of the freedom you have without kids. You can sleep all you want, have all the free time you want and never have to worry about a babysitter."

She felt the electricity of her heart, the nerves sending impulses of grief, self-loathing, and humiliation through her entire being.

Picture-flashes of:

baby naming books

fertility charts

syringes

drugs

early morning drives for monitoring

the stress of making it back to work on time so no one would ask questions

ultrasounds by medics with cold hands

standing in line at the pharmacy buying tampons while the teenager ahead buys a carton of cigarettes

and stuffs them into the back of a stroller

explaining health history to a doctor seen for the third opinion

invasive paperwork and home study interviews

a savings account for an education fund gone to pay for services for infertility and subsequent adoption fees

a referral sometime in 2011

finally seeing a positive pregnancy test

twins

contractions and blood

loss

numbness

another pregnancy

elation

contractions and blood, so much blood

hoisting hips into the air to make it easier for the doctor to pull out fetal tissue

another heartbreaking loss


"Yes, life is good," she strained, as she ducked into her classroom just in time for the first tear to fall.

Never assume.

Tomorrow is Infant Loss and Miscarriage Remembrance Day. If you know someone who has suffered a loss, give them a hug.

Thanksgiving 2008

We soaked up some Vitamin D in Enniskillen today.  Can you tell that I am in desperate need?

Entering the Conservation Area - I'm already pathetically lagging behind.

 

Contemplation

 

 

  

 Trying to find a way out.

 

There wasn't a lot of talking along the way.  We walked mostly in silence, taking in the beauty with all of our senses and shutting out the world around us. 

Our Sunday in Pictures

Lake Scugog in Port Perry, Ontario

 

  

  

 

 

  

  

  

Why is K2 gripping his head in his hands...

 

...and looking so out of sorts?

 

I keep beating him at Trivial Pursuit!!

 

Yeah...that's right...those are my pies!!

Souls That Tremble

It seems to me that, in general terms, most people look outside themselves for the bravery and confidence they seek. Losing sight of the obvious, people tend to expect others to figure it all out, to guide the way and to provide the lessons to learn. We ask others for advice, we depend on others to weigh in on our decisions, and we often have a list of people through whom we pass ideas for evaluation. Every time we give ourselves away to someone else’s beliefs about how best to move forward in a particular situation, we lose a little of our own navigational aptitude.

The thing is, we all have it in us. This innate capability to know, deep down inside, the answers to our questions is within all of us. The obstacles are all of the voices that we have invited in. Think, for a moment, about the last time you were present at a concert, or the last time you were amid hundreds of people. Walls shaking, mirrors thumping with the beat of the music, make it difficult for most people to formulate a clear thought and make decisions confidently. Now, think about the last time you tried to work through a major decision in your life. All those voices crowding your head can be as distracting as those at a concert or party. We begin to consider how others would resolve the issue at hand, what others would say to our considerations, and we might even envision the ensuing judgment for the decisions made. Many of you can likely describe friends and family’s faces of judgment. But, in all of this, where is our voice?

What if, instead of sitting with a friend to discuss an issue or a problem, we sat with ourselves? What if, instead of relying on others to give us direction, we clear a path for ourselves? What if, instead of hiding behind the fear of the unknown, we venture out and embrace it? What if we decide to be our own heroes?

Quiet your mind. The answers will come. Bravery is not something that happens when you are full of confidence. Bravery is who you are when you are most terrified, when, despite all those outer voices clenching their tight grip, you continue to take that shaky step forward.

A hero moves with a soul that trembles.