Hairy

Here’s a word to the wise: don’t have a baby at Thanksgiving.  I used to be really pleased with myself about having babies on calendar holidays, because it gave me the perfect excuse not to have a party, since everyone’s busy anyway.  This smugness only lasted as long as my children had no clue what was going on - a time capsule that has apparently closed.  This year, as Olive turned 3, it was made vehemently clear to me that I had to provide a birthday party option in amongst what is arguably one of the more stressful weeks of the year.  What I’m learning about North American living is that wherever there’s a turkey, there’s stress.  

This year, thanks to my clever timing with birth, we had my birthday (40th, I’m ok with it), Thanksgiving, and Olive’s birthday all within the space of about 48 hours.  Frank and I went from fabulous, celebratory (drunk) Thanksgiving hosts to 6.50am partycake bakers in our pyjamas.  It was not an easy transition.  I was under strict instructions from Olive to provide a purple cake with pink icing, but purple is a hard colour to muster when you’re not very food colour savvy, and your eyes aren’t ready to be open yet.  When the cake emerged with a flourish from the oven, it looked more of a turgid flesh colour, like a dead body pulled from a river on CSI.  First task failed, party guests arriving in 20 minutes, nobody showered or dressed.

I don’t know if anybody else has noticed that guinea pigs are taking over the world, but if you have a 3 year old daughter in your house, you will know what I mean.  Zhu-Zhu guinea pig beepy weird things are huge point-scorers, and Frank is on his game.  Having found the right pink guinea pig in Walmart, he also found a tubular slide thing for it to go down, which I can tell you was outstanding work.  What he didn’t anticipate was spending ages assembling the slide at the party, while a pack of 8 children breathed on the back of his head, their fingers twitching.  He did well under pressure, but once the slide was fully functional, we couldn’t for the life of us find the guinea pig toy.  Where had it gone?  Mass panic broke out.  All the adults in the room started shouting, “Who had it LAST?” in voices that were getting more and more high-pitched and accusatory.  The 8-child pack was running from room to room, overturning chairs and ravaging small drawers as it went.  Soon it would turn on us.

There was such a frenzy to find the guinea pig, that yet again, I found myself kneeling on the sitting room floor, bum in the air, face under the sofa, squinting into the darkness.  It is my most common activity, the sofa squint, along with washing dishes.  It’s all I do now.  On this occasion, my adrenalin was high, and as I thought I could see the pink toy in a far corner, I took a deep, excited breath, hoovering the world’s biggest dust-bunny straight into my mouth.  I think it would be fair to say that had I placed an entire, live guinea pig in my mouth, it would have been less hairy.  As I ran to the kitchen sink to scrape 5lbs of hairy dust from my tongue, I heard cheers of joy as the pink guinea pig was found behind a skateboard with its nose pressed against a corner.  For the remainder of the party, I sat sullenly hacking up hairballs, like Garfield.  

As the party guests were leaving, I realised that somebody had found the blue food colouring I’d used to make my grey dead-flesh cake, and that the same person had dropped it on the floor, created a blue puddle, and then trodden the puddle all around our house.  I couldn’t find the culprit but I did try, pulling people’s feet out from under them to inspect the bottoms of their socks with a muttering, mad-person way about me.  This is how I will be remembered at my daughter’s 3rd birthday party: the crazy-eyed one with the chesty cough and the foot fetish.  It’s lucky the people at the party had some prior knowledge of me. 

I never did track that perpetrator down, but there are blue dye stains all over my wood floor.  I’m past caring.  Olive draws on the floor every 20 minutes in what are misleadingly called washable colours, and I never notice until her work is far from washable.  But in the words of another good hairy hamster I know, that is another story.

Merry Jamaican Llama

I am not North American, a fact made more clear to me at Christmas time than at any other time of year.  I am used to small, demure groups of carolers circling the village square Christmas tree, holding lanterns and singing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’ in warbly melody.  Then the mulled wine and minced pies get passed around, and everyone says, “Ooh, lovely.  Those look lovely, Joyce.”  The village Christmas tree is lit with white lights, understatedly.  After the mince pies, the merry group will amble back up the hill, past the stone walls, through the field with the sheep huddling.

My experience of Christmas in rural England has turned me into a full-scale Christmas Nazi, as my husband is happy to point out.  I will not allow lights on the Christmas tree that are coloured, nor will I allow trinkets or baubles on the tree that are strangely-shaped or involve any kind of glitter.  Bows I outlaw entirely.  Whenever the kids bring me handmade tree decorations from pre-school, I always say, that’s marvellous, and think no way I’m hanging that on my Christmas Nazi Tree.  Advent calendars must contain a maximum of 25 windows, and have some kind of reference to a Christmas scene.  Last year Bill chose a ’31 Days of Chocolate’ NHL calendar, and Olive chose what appeared to be 31 Days of Disney Princesses – both of which caused me to have a big sulk in Walmart.  Obviously this year I presented no choice whatsoever to the kids on December 1st, and handed them each an advent calendar with an olde worlde scene of Father Christmas, snowy houses and mistletoe.  That’s better.  As I say to Frank quite often, I know I’m terrible, but I’m also right.

I am trying to build new traditions, however.  I really am trying.  I took the kids to see Santa arrive on Baker St last year and was managing to keep it together quite well until Santa arrived in the crane of a huge, honking fire truck and everyone suddenly started punching the air and chanting, “SANTA! SANTA! SANTA!” like we were all at an American Football game.  My Eurosnobbery kicked right in and I spiralled into a deep-breathing panic attack.  Veto. 

This year I skipped that rowdy sporting event and tried the Christmas Nativity on Baker St, where I stood in amongst a crowd of people eating hotdogs, while an upbeat Afro-Caribbean band played not carols, and some llamas stood vacuously in a pen.  I explained to Bill, when he asked, that the llamas had probably wandered over from South America to Jerusalem to sneak into the shepherds’ flock.  I was also more than slightly perturbed by the sight of a real, live, newborn baby in the -10 arctic freeze, flailing on the lap of Mary who looked about 12 and was clearly very uncomfortable holding a child, especially a screaming its head off one.  Really?  If they were going for authenticity, here’s an idea: maybe forgo the blaring Jamaican music and the hotdogs rather than the fake baby option.  “What’s wrong with Jesus, Mummy?” asked Olive, and I told her that probably it was a bit colder, noisier and weirder than he was hoping for.  I concurred.

My favourite part of Christmas on Baker was watching my friend Penny’s daughter eat her yellow glowstick.  She bit it, then sucked out the liquid, so that her tongue (before it started burning) was like a lurid distress flare in the winter night.  I’m happy to make that sight a yearly tradition, especially because, again, nothing says Christmas like neon-yellow chemicals.  We Wish You a Merry Christmas, Forgive me my Eurosnobbery, We Wish You a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Digging

Last week I got a rescue dog, because apparently I felt I didn’t have enough things to look after.  I think when you’ve been a mother for 5 years, your resistance to a sad pair of brown eyes is very limited; and also, you have forgotten everything else you used to do except look after things.

The bonus of having a pet is that you can name it.  I found the whole naming of children thing to be the most exciting aspect of parenting, and whenever I hear of a new friend who is pregnant, I won’t sleep for days because I am busy naming her child for her.  My friend Harlo and I considered setting up a business, naming people’s children for them.  We could present prospective (pregnant) clients with a shortlist of names, tailor-made for their tastes, industry-approved by us.  I still think this is the best business idea we’ve ever had (although to be fair, it’s not as good as any of the ideas for reality tv shows we’ve come up with).  It’s lucky the dog we got this week had such sad brown eyes, because he came pre-named and that was nearly a deal-breaker for me.

His name is Digger, a name given to him by the rescue shelter, which I thought was a bit of a gamble.  It’s like giving a dog the name Chewy, or Barker, or Childbiter and hoping someone will put their hand up and take him home.  They need to up their marketing department.  As it turns out, Digger is very well-named which leads me to believe the joke is on us.  Digger also likes to sleep on my head at night and perhaps even on my face, because I keep waking up and spitting out dog hair.  By 6am the entire household is in our bed, it’s ever so cosy.  I have to take Digger with me everywhere too, because he has severe separation anxiety and does helicopter-propellor spray poos up the wall when left alone. 

The truth is I love him, though, and I think when your kids are 5 and 3 you find a little bit of extra room to love something new.  It must mean it’s getting easier.  And as soon as it gets easier, it’s important to make it more difficult again.  I’m outside all the time now, with the kids running alongside the dog in front of me – it makes me feel I’m raising them right.  Funny how a dog can make you feel peaceful about that for a minute.  Digger is the closest I’ll ever get to relating to people with 3 children; except if I’d had a 3rd, I’d at least have got to name it.

Pretend You’re Not In

My friend Coco says that Fall is drinking season.  Cosy evenings cooking roast chicken; a hockey game on in the background; a bottle of red wine breathing near you.  I think she might be onto something.  In my world, Fall is Birthday and Thanksgiving season, which adds to reasons why Coco is right.  This Fall I have drunk more than I have in 5 years and, as a happy by-product, have also rediscovered my personality.  I had wondered where it had gone.       

Normally for me Fall is the time of year when I turn all the lights off and pretend I’m not in.  Between 2007-2009, my only real reason for this was that I was trying to hide from Trick or Treaters.  I hated those guys.  Who wants a doorbell to ring 65 times between the hours of 6 and 9pm when you are pacing the living room, trying to make your newborn baby go to sleep? I would be doing the jiggle-sway with Olive in the shadows, whilst relentless Trick or Treaters banged on the door and leaned all their weight on the doorbell.  Those guys will not take no for an answer, not when there’s candy involved.  It was as if my house’s complete silence and darkness was some kind of playful Halloween gimmick I’d laid on for them.  For two seasons I was the Grinch of Halloween, big-eyed and fuming inside my cave.  Then last year I decided that Trick or Treating was totally socially acceptable, since my children were now 2 and 4.  Game on!  I switched teams and joined the marauding hordes, and I haven’t looked back since.  These days I hammer happily on the doors of old people’s houses with no lights on, and I refuse to acknowledge frantically-scribbled notes stuck to the door saying ‘Baby Sleeping’.  Who cares! We want Funsize Snickers!  

My October black-out persists, however, despite my newfound enjoyment of October 31st.  I have found that so-called gifts of Fall fruit are another good reason to shut all the curtains and pretend you’re out.  Now that I’ve been living here 5 years, I have a wealth of neighbourly friends who love nothing better than to share their gardening bounty with me.  My 83 year old Italian neighbour climbs over the chain-link fence (literally) every October, with a vat of freshly-harvested fruit over her shoulder.  I see her coming and break into a sweat, then let her knock for ages while I hide behind the sofa.  Inevitably Olive will walk past me and open the door, allowing an influx of 400 plums and 250 apples.  It would be fine if I had any of the requisite skills of housewifery, but all that happens is I stare at 400 plums for a month, wondering what to do with them.  Sometimes she brings me 45 potatoes too, which grow tendrils as they lie together in the dark, plotting world domination.  Frank knows I’m frightened of potatoes when they do this, and puts them under my pillow.  All in all, I can only handle fruit and vegetables in meal-size quantities, so Fall in Nelson can be a difficult time for me.  Sometimes I wish we could all just live like people do in England, and not share anything or talk to each other.  At any rate, giving me a bucket of fruit is like handing me a numbered list of my own shortcomings.  It is a rubbish present. 

I need a new plan for fruit avoidance, though, because my Pretend I’m Not In technique is falling short.  This Fall my neighbourhood octogenarian scaled the fence like The Terminator, ignored my dark house and walked right into my kitchen, leaving the heaving bucket on the counter while I hid in the bathroom, deep-breathing.  She won’t take no for an answer either: I bet she was a maverick Trick or Treater in her day.  As soon as she had gone, I fumble-dialled Steph and told her I was having a seasonal panic attack.  Steph is the kind of mother/wife who can roll with the fruit punches.  She talked me down and as a result, I did rally and make a plum crisp.  It took me ages, though, and I still have 230 plums left.

My favourite season is Winter because nothing grows.  I find it very relaxing.

Still Got It

Like all women my age in my situation, I have a rich fantasy life. 

Once a year, like it’s a birthday, I get my car detailed and celebrate my secret self.  Car detailing is brilliant fantasy fuel, followed closely by buying nice undies.  These are, however, luxury cards to play, and it’s vital you play them at the right time of year.  Some fantasists I could mention detail their cars in June, which to me is a schoolgirl error.  Every October 1st I drive my family vehicle into the car detail lot, with sand pouring out of the door in a steady stream as I get out.  There are a year’s worth of fruitbar wrappers stuck to the backs of the seats.  Lord only knows what is in the cupholders. When I go back at 4pm to pick the car up, I follow two simple rules.  1.  I never, ever make eye contact with the man who actually cleaned the car (because shame can be a real fantasy-deflater); and 2.  I never, ever take the kids with me.  This way, I can drive my car away looking like the young, hip, girl-about-town that I am, for the duration of the drive home.  People watch me as I drive by, and I say, yes, that’s right – I live in the city and I really have my life together.  I’m off now to my warehouse loft apartment downtown, where I will eat exotic leaf salad and drink expensive wine, whilst listening to my Miles Davis cd.  I love 4pm on October 1st.

The other well-developed fantasy that I have is that I’ve still got it.  When it comes to this one, Frank is just as guilty as I am.  In our minds, we are such cool, young parents that it’s hard to believe the Pitt-Jolies haven’t called us yet for advice.  An example of my believing I’ve still got it would be my recent skateboarding morning with my friend, Coco, a woman who actually does still have it.  I don’t know why I hang out with her, it’s really a bad idea for me.  Despite all my efforts to appear young and with-it, I got into a nasty speed wobble coming down a hill and had to abort in a panic.  I had to go from standing on the board, to running downhill full-tilt with my nose an inch from the pavement, while both my children watched me.  If I’d gone down I would definitely have broken my hip. 

Frank’s no better.  He set up a whirling plane in Bill’s room last week, which does laps and laps round the ceiling on a wire, fast, with a propellor going.  This was all going well for him until it was time to turn the thing off.  Whenever I want to make myself laugh lately, I think of what Frank looked like wobbling on a kitchen chair, trying to catch the plane as it whizzed by.  He went from Cool Dad, to Dad with Old Person Balance in the blink of an eye.  The plane nearly gave him a nosebleed with every pass it made, and his attempts to stop it with his hands were half-hearted at best.  That propellor was a menace.  In the end, we had to get the oven gloves.

I refuse to surrender the fantasy.  I’ve still got it, I don’t care how many times my children stare at me with confused, mildly amused faces.  I’ve got years before they’re teenagers and contempt comes into the mix.  Check back then.

Family Holiday

I learnt this summer that when I say I’m keen to go camping, I need to a) check if it’s me talking and/or b) factor in at least 3 weeks to pack the car.  I am new to the notion of Family Holidays and therefore a little vulnerable.  Camping, as a version of Family Holiday, seems to be to be the worst kind of baptism of fire.  I used to travel the world, with a backpack small enough to fit in a glove compartment.  I was absolutely horrified this August by the amount of things I needed to put in the car before I left.  I even considered buying a minivan.

The crux of the problem was that I had chosen to leave on a weekday morning, robbing myself of Frank’s military precision when it comes to any kind of family outing.  Floundering alone, it took me literally 5 hours to get ready.  In the old days, I would have been in Greenland by then.  It didn’t help that for every item of beachlife that I removed from the car, Olive and Bill would pass me on the way back to the house carrying exactly what I’d just taken out a minute before.  We were like a line of dwarves, whistling as we worked, carrying the same spades back and forth to the backdoor.  When I finally managed to thwart the production line, the kids took it inside and emptied all the sandy buckets into the cracks of our wood flooring.  It was then that I started to get that wide-eyed look.

At around lunchtime, I drew a line underneath preparation, and just started driving.  I was lucky I remembered the children, I was that harried.  Now for a 5 hour drive with no DVD player because I’d punted it into the road tripping over the boogieboard that I’d already removed 5 times.  We made it to Castlegar Airport, 20 minutes down the road, where both children needed an immediate bathroom break.  I misread the entrance roadmarking and therefore did 5 loops around the Airport trying to find the way in.  The kids thought I was being a fun mum; clearly they couldn’t see the reds of my eyes.  I unpacked the kids, fake-calmly, and sprinted to the bathroom.  When we sprinted back out again 3 minutes later, I had a parking ticket.  That 96 year old man in the airport who issues the tickets?  He’s faster than you might think.

I have hazy memories of our fun family holiday journey.  Somewhere in there were 7 hours’ driving that should have been 4, I think mainly due to the 38 bathroom breaks an hour that are necessary to the under 5s.  On bathroom break #9, I lost concentration for a second, and helped Olive pee straight into the undies around her ankles.  The spare shorts that I’d packed for her were an early item into the car, and had 4 hours’ of camping equipment lying on top of them.  When we finally arrived at the campsite in Penticton, an entire day’s drive from our home, apparently, I got out of the car and my flip flop snapped. 

I don’t really like camping.  I know in Canada that’s equivalent to stating, out loud, that you think Wayne Gretzy is over-rated.  I realise I’m sticking my neck out.  But the truth is, I hate bugs, I hate lying in a too-tight sleeping bag wondering if a bear is about to rip through the centimetre of canvas separating us, I don’t like s’mores (there, I said it), I don’t enjoy using glacial arctic lake water as a bath substitute, and I especially, above all other things, hate packing the car.  I do like Wayne Gretzky though.

Triathlon

People have been stopping me in the street lately, asking me if I shut my blog down because I never made it past the Finish line in the triathlon and couldn’t take the cybershame.  It’s a fair question, especially since the only thing my mum repeatedly asked me about the whole event was, “Will there be ambulances there?”  The truth of the matter is that ever since making it across the finish line of the triathlon, I have been studiously lazy.  I’ve been lounging, safe in the knowledge that with two labours and a triathlon under my belt, I never have to exercise again.  

For those of you who followed this blog through its days of rigorous triathlon training, it must have been like the time Frank read a 500 page novel whilst backpacking with his friends, oblivious to the fact that they had long ago ripped out the final 4 pages.  I can now reveal the missing ending of my triathlon saga, a story that begins 48 hours before the race, with an unexpectedly professional phonecall from my good friend, Rohan.  “Right, what are you eating?” she opened with, before I could get a hello in, a question which implied she’d had some kind of futuristic video messaging app installed her end which I hadn’t been made privy to.  “What?” I replied, playing for time, and trying to sound like I wasn’t chewing.  “Everything you eat from now until the race has to include carbs.  You have to carb load,” she said, with an air of Jillian Michaels that I was finding exciting.  I promised to carb load at every opportunity for the next 48 hours, only to find out that I already do that anyway.  My diet didn’t change one iota.  Jillian Michaels and/or Rohan will have a field day when they find that out.  

I showed up to the pre-race meeting to listen to an hour’s worth of course information and event rules.  I felt a bit like I’d wandered into the Olympic Village without a security pass, but nobody had noticed yet.  I felt like that, I should say, until I glanced to my right during the speeches, and saw my neighbour.  She was staring the course organiser right in the eye, listening intently, as she shovelled handful after handful of Miss Vickie’s chips into her mouth.  It was an hour-long production line - she never faltered – and the chip packet she’d brought along for the meeting was the size of a small sleeping bag.  I absolutely loved sitting next to her: she was so confidently non-triathletey.  Her incongruity reminded me of that Farside cartoon of the Positive Self-Image Seminar, where the speaker is taking questions from the crowd, and saying, “Let’s hear from that fat guy at the back with the thick glasses.”   Whether or not she was taking carb loading to a whole new level, there was something very calming about sitting next to that woman.    

My calm didn’t last.  By 6am on race day my adrenalin was flowing like a fast-paced river.  That might account for why I managed to swim like a rocket in the first leg: I think it was nerves.  I took off at a cracking pace, which is an interesting decision when you can’t see anything.  On lap 1 I swam right up onto the stomach of a large lady doing a slow backstroke.  I was like a seal, beaching.  

Having made it out of the water, I ran far too fast up the beach and into the transition zone, where I grappled for about 15 minutes with clothes that wouldn’t go onto wet skin, all the while breathing like a hoover.  I definitely used up vital glycaemic stores trying to get my sports bra to unroll out of its tight, wet line of cloth and get into position, so that I could actually consider getting onto my bike.  I also remember being gutted that my felt tip number on my arm had rubbed off on my wetsuit – I only entered the triathlon to get the felt tip numbers.  I would later draw it on again in a black felt-tip from Olive’s colouring bag.

I had a good lead on the pack after my uncharacteristically dynamite swim, a lead I held onto for about 7 minutes until 55 people overtook me on their bikes.  The only person I managed to pass on the bike leg had a puncture and was limping it home.  As the 38th person blazed past me with a demoralisingly cheery, “On your left!”, I started to check for rocket fuel coming off the back of them because seriously, my car doesn’t go the speed of most of those cyclists. 

There was a moment of horror for me when I jumped off my bike and began running, where I realised that actually my legs weren’t moving, only my arms were.  I was toast.  My calf muscles were cramping up, and I had to keep stopping near bins to stretch my feet upwards against them.  They were the kind of stretches that meant I had to put my face almost into the bin while I took big, deep breaths.  That didn’t help.  As I rounded the corner towards Safeways, I was overtaken by a family of 4 walking their Yorkshire terrier.  The father glanced back, probably to double check that I actually had a number on my chest, and was a registered racer.  He looked sympathetic, and confused.  My own family were loyally cheering me on from the bridge, and must have seen me coming 15 minutes before I actually reached them.  I’m pretty sure neither of my children have seen the movie ‘Dawn of the Dead’ yet, but I think the sight of me lurching towards them at zombie pace, gritting my teeth, might have been quite the preview.  As I passed my son, he stuck his little hand out for a high five which caused me to do a massive sheep-bray-sob-heave, which I’m really thankful the photographer didn’t capture.  From that point, though, I have to say I rallied, and I finished the race looking deceptively at ease.  And that, after all, is the main thing.  

The day after the triathlon I went wakeboarding.  Didn’t everyone?  I’ve never been wakeboarding before, but apparently I am Olympic and not a day past 19, so being pulled at 500,000 horsepower, face-down, holding a rope shouldn’t really be a problem.  The day after the wakeboarding, I found I couldn’t walk, and that lasted for 7 days.   From triathlon to unable to move in 24 hours.  Who else of my felt-tipped brethren can say they did that?  See, I knew I was a record-breaker.

Country Living

I recently spent a fantastic morning in the country with my new friend, Sasha.  She lives out there in a farmhouse overlooking buttercups and horses, with a deck where she drinks exotic tea in the breeze, and sighs.  Sasha’s lifestyle has shot straight into my Top 3 Most Enviable Lifestyles, alongside Joss’ in her Vancouver art deco apartment and my oldest sister’s lifestyle of fine wine and luxury travel.  There seems to be a common denominator in all of the lifestyles I envy.  Can you tell what it is yet?

My friend Rohan hot-footed it to the country retreat too – she didn’t need to be asked twice.  Accompanying her were her 2 kids, and between us we were babysitting Steph’s 2 kids, so we were quite the Circus act arriving at the peaceful farmstead.  We might as well have been blowing trumpets.  Sasha emerged from her cottage, staggering slightly and looking like she had just woken up.  It was 10.15am, and she had.  (Exhibit A of lifestyle envy.)  Before she had time to rub her eyes, she was surrounded by 6 frantically shouting children, just like when Captain Von Trapp arrives back from Vienna and hasn’t blown his whistle yet.  Sasha did very well with the sudden change of pace we’d delivered her: she was helping the kids feed apples to the horses in no time. 

I am not a natural with horses.  As a 12 year old girl, I didn’t love ponies, I loved Face from ‘The A Team’.  I was bitten on the very top of the head once by a horse whose lips I walked underneath.  I think I was just the right height at the time to tickle its velvety lip hair, so it was understandable.  I was also kicked in the thigh by a horse that I walked around the back of: I went flying backwards out of the stable like I was in a cartoon, and had a perfectly horse-shoe-shaped bruise to show for it.  I remember my mum telling me that was lucky.  My sister rode a pony at the Fair, I remember, only to have the saddle she was sitting on slide sideways until it was actually underneath the pony.  My sister’s head was dragging along in the mud directly beneath the pony’s belly as it walked along.  With such a good track record of horsemanship in our family, it was exciting to pass the mantle on to Bill and Olive.  I have to say that the apple feeding went surprisingly well; but it might be beginners’ luck.

I did not grow up in the country, I grew up in a coastal town which in Canadian terms would be a city.  It was clear to the entire party that I was a little out of my element, out here on a country lane, when Sasha caught me telling Bill that the bull we were looking at was a girl.  “But it’s got horns,” said Rohan and Sasha in stereo sound, while I stared at both of them blankly.  No wonder my children are so bemused all the time: I am their main source of daily information on the world.  I really should go back to work and have Frank parent.  ”Bill, that is not an udder,” Sasha said, taking charge.  “You don’t want to milk that.”

The thing about taking a gaggle of children for a walk down the lane to see the neighbour’s sheep is that inevitably one of the gaggle will suddenly need the bathroom with such urgency that options are sparse.  This would be manageable if it weren’t for what I like to call the Child Squat Reflex.  This reflex is similar to the Yawn Reflex – whereby you see someone do a yawn, and you immediately have to do one yourself.  With kids, if one of them bunkers down in an awkwardly public part of the road for an inappropriate bathroom break, you can be sure you’ll have every child in the vicinity hunched alongside within seconds.  You can never get away with a 1-child sneaky one, they always blow your cover.  Children run from their houses to join squat lines on the road, in the same way they will chase down ice cream vans.  On the walk back from the sheep viewing, I had 5 children squatting on the side of the road performing a No.2 Quintet.  Sasha and Rohan, meanwhile, were busy laughing their heads off.  I am also not well-versed in the country lifestyle habit of using leaves as toilet paper.  I found that very stressful.  I had absolutely no idea whether or not I was wiping 5 lily-white backsides with Poison Ivy.  The woman who points out the horns on a cow should really not be the one in the group entrusted with leaf selection.

Perhaps I should enroll myself in a Survival Weekend to learn about flora and fauna.  It is my view that at some point in their young lives, my children ought to be allowed to enjoy the countryside and perhaps one day pick a berry and eat it.  If they pick one at the moment, I scream and run at them, knocking the berry onto the ground and stamping on it.  And those are just raspberries from the neighbour’s yard, but you can’t be too careful.  I’ve read ‘Into The Wild’, you know.  I know how that guy dies.  I need someone to accompany me on all trips outside city limits.  Harlo would be good: she told me once she could live for days in the wilderness, living on nuts and fruits.  Frank would also be an obvious choice, because he’s like living with Bear Grylls.  I feel a strong need to improve my Country skills, though.  Maybe the answer is just to move in with Sasha.  Lord knows I could do with a lie-in.

I May Have Joined The Marines

If you’re feeling overly warm in the blazing heat of July, why not wander down to Kootenay Lake and dip your toe in the water?  You may have to snip your toe off with a pair of scissors later, in the style of a frostbitten Nepalese Sherpa, but hey, at least you’ll look brave and outdoorsy.  There’s also a certain pride to striding confidently to the lake edge in a wetsuit: you feel like you might be a Navy Seal on black ops.  People stare at you and if you try hard, you can imagine it’s out of awe and admiration. 

I’m not sure, though, that Navy Seals teeter on the water’s edge like I do, making universally-understood gestures for ‘You Have Got to Be Kidding Me, It’s Baltic’.   I stood in ankle-deep water this morning, hopping from one numb foot to the other, thinking that were I a visitor to these parts and watching from the shore, it would be hard to discern from my movement whether the water was actually hot or cold.  As I thought this, I heard a man’s voice behind me.  He sounded relaxed and amused, which were not moods I could relate to at the time.  ”You don’t have to prove anything to me, honey,” he said, with the laid-backness of someone not currently wearing swimwear.  ”And just think -  after 8 seconds, you won’t feel a thing.”  I laughed, through my gritted teeth. 

I’ve had to swim in our local ice-floe twice this month, doggedly following the instructions on my plan for How To Train for A Triathlon When You Have Limited Time/Fitness/Intelligence.  The 2nd swim was this morning: it has taken me 4 hours to defrost my forehead, and my fingers are still slapping on the keyboard like they’re wooden.  On the 1st swim, I knew I had to stifle any signs of weakness because my children were watching me from a beach blanket with Steph.  They were waving encouragingly and Steph was doing thumbs ups.  I thought to myself what a great example of fitness and dedication I was setting for my children, as I looked around desperately for another swimmer.  If I could trick my children into watching someone other than me swim, I wouldn’t actually have to get in at all. 

The thing about swimming in water cold enough to kill off all of one’s extremities within 8 seconds is that, weirdly, nobody else is doing it.  I thought it was a favourite Canadian pastime - coldness – they do everything else in sub-zero temperatures quite happily, from what I can tell.  My in-laws chit-chat outside around a burning oil-barrel all January, wearing sleeping bag clothing.  I watch them through the window, from inside the house, where it is warm enough to stay alive.  I’ve been living in Canada for 4 years now: I thought this summer it was time I embraced Canadian burly-ness.  So where is everyone else?  Where are my triathlon brethren?  Is nobody else doing their homework?  I cannot believe it.  It’s like being 12 again and realising suddenly that I am the only one who’s uncool and/or the teacher’s pet.  My obedience has pervaded into adulthood; it’s really a major character flaw.  This is why I keep walking myself into the water whilst I weep and do thumbs up back at my children. 

The launch into ice-cold water would be a great hangover cure, if only I still had the chance to go out and party.  I have found I must swim the 1st 50m with my head sticking up stalk-like from the water, just to give my brain a chance to catch up with what on earth I am doing.  I think I look like a granny swimming, or a pelican.  Today I was vaguely aware that people I knew were waving to me from the beach – I attempted a wave back but felt I was quickly turning into that Stevie Smith poem.  If I wasn’t careful, they’d deploy the lifeboat.  I stopped swimming when my fingers scraped along the sand and I realised I was actually in ankle-deep water again.  It’s hard to navigate in a current, when you can’t see or feel anything; apparently I had swum up the beach.  I stood up proud like the Marine that I am, and ran up the shore on my two blocks of foot with my rubber knees bending the wrong way.  It didn’t look like Baywatch.

I’m going to write a letter to the race organisers before July 31st to tell them that I deserve a headstart in the race for what I’ve endured in training.  I think I should be rewarded for stoically training in the lake, and the respect of my children doesn’t feel an adequate prize.  A half hour head-start might though.  Harlo says if they don’t go for it, she’ll rent scuba gear and strap some flippers onto me for the 2nd lap.  That would be alright, too.  Really, though, who am I kidding: it’s fair to say at this point that if I make it to the Start line I’ll be pleased with myself.

Ethel Thayer

I have always had a thing for swim platforms.  I think it’s because I grew up in England, where there aren’t any, and also because I watched the movie ‘On Golden Pond’ twice a day for the whole of 1985 when I was off school with Glandular Fever.  Every other kid I knew was watching ’Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ but I was really square, if you can believe it.  I had to come home from a sleepover at the age of 14 because the movie was too scary for me.  I was that kid.  I liked movies about loons.  So, that said, this past weekend was my first lifetime experience of a real swim platform, and I could barely contain my excitement.  At last, I could do backflips into the water like Jane Fonda.  I knew my day would come.

It was a camping trip that brought me to my moment of Canadian destiny.  I took Bill and Olive down the beach at dusk and it was completely empty.  The campsite itself was jam-packed with Canada Day festivity, but everyone was busy cooking their bbq’s and drawing maple leaves on their cheeks.  It was just me, the kids, the glass-smooth lake, evening golden dappliness, and the swim platform.

I thought, as I took my trousers off, that the platform itself was probably only anchored in thigh-deep water.  This was my at-a-glance assessment, but I was confident.  “Let’s go out and sit on it,” I said out loud to the kids, thinking what a great, fun parent I was.  There was a momentary inward hesitation when I noticed that I was standing on a public beach in red spotted underwear, but I was committed – I had entered into a contract.  Bill was already skipping happily into the water.  I made a conscious decision not to be aware of the band of lily-white flesh above my short line that hasn’t seen sunshine since 2005.  Let’s not dwell on that, I thought, forging into the absolutely baltic water. 

I can’t believe that the lake water of Canada is any warmer in July than it is for those people who go swimming on New Year’s Day, like nutters.  It cannot possibly be colder than what I was standing in.  Within 2 seconds I had lost all feeling below the knee.  Bill, meanwhile, was already climbing the ladder up onto the platform, so again, holding Olive in my arms, I bravely pushed forward, knocking the icebergs out of the way.  The unfortunate fact of the matter was that in order to reach the ladder, I had to stand in waist-deep water, with my trusty underpants completely submerged.  This was getting less and less Jane Fonda.  I chose not to dwell on that, either.

It’s possible that Bill and Olive haven’t yet loved Norman and Ethel Thayer like I have, and so their appreciation of the swim-platform-Canadian-moment may have been less profound.  I felt disgruntled that, having braved it out there in my undies, I got to sit down for about 1.75 seconds before we were off again.  There was nothing golden about it, and those loons are fake.  Once we got back to shore, I had the freshly interesting dilemma of whether to remove my wet undies in full view of the campsite, exposing buttocks that haven’t seen the sun since 1976; or of just walking home in the undies, carrying my dry trousers.  I chose option 2.  What I didn’t factor in, of course, were 2 vital things: a) the campsite was full of people I knew a little bit – Nelson faces who I’m certain knew me in the same way and b) Olive had ‘ridden’ to the beach on her tricycle.  When Olive rides her tricycle, she pushes on the pedals with the strength of a day-old kitten, which means I must push her along or it’ll take a full day to get 100 metres.

It was a special kind of Canada Day parade I provided for the campsite this year.  I pushed Olive on her tricycle, which is low to the ground, right through the main drag of the campsite, past 50 families eating their hotdogs.  I was wearing wet, red, polka-dot underpants with my backside high up in the air.  I tried to keep my head down and not make eye contact, but this only served to prolongue the journey because we travelled in zig-zags – not only does Olive not pedal, she doesn’t steer either.  She’s really not much of a bike rider.  On the few occasions where I had to look up to avoid running full-tilt into a tree, I’m pretty sure I noticed families stopping their chewing as I passed.  It didn’t help that Bill was riding ahead of us ringing the bell on his bike, announcing the arrival of the Queen of Sheba.  I could have done without that.  I tried to emit pride and confidence but it was a shaky veneer.  As soon as we were in the vicinity of home tent, I abandoned Olive to fend for herself, broke into a sprint past Frank and our 2 friends, and forbade them to speak of what they had seen.  My Golden Pond needed more planning, and perhaps swimwear next time.  They don’t tell you that in the movie.