Disney Dream

Disney Dream,  thats what they call it.  The boat.  And it is!  I have never been on a cruise before and me and my little family had been counting down the weeks and days until our trip for months.  We had the most amazing fun time ever.  I mean ever. I love Disney,  they so live up to all the hype.  It was magical,  just like they promised.  We set sail from Port Canaveral in Florida, and landed in the Bahamas.  We had a day trip there to the huge hotel Atalantis and it was pretty cool.  The Bahamas are beautiful and the weather was great.  I have, to say the the city of Nassau you can tell is stricken by poverty and quite run down in some of the places we drove through on the way to the hotel.  Like you wouldn't want to walk around there.  But back to the glossy world of vacations.  Next we sailed to Disneys private little island called CastAway Cay.  It was really cute.  We swam with and fed stingrays,  played on the beach,  and attempted snorkeling.   On the boat Ellas favorite thing was the huge waterslide called the Aquaduck that wraped around the the whole deck of the boat.  She even talked me into riding it with her a couple of times and I am glad I did.  The shows were amazing and the food was...argh....the food!  We all put on a few I think.  Now I am so ready for warmer weather.  I am all convinced that I want to go somewhere tropical for every vacation.  Thanks a million to my wonderful hubby who earned this trip through all his hard work.  And to Edward Jones,  those guys really know how to make you feel happy to be part of the company.  He are a million pics for you to ooh and awe over or completely disregard.  Either- or. 

The Icky Stuff

It started with a gag, and then a horrible smell. One glance in the review mirror and I knew we were in serious trouble. Just keep your head down and keep driving I told myself, you are two blocks from home. Turns out two blocks was way too far. Second glance was just in time to see a second stream of projectile vomit erupt for my one year old's mouth.

"Eww MOM, there is puke everywhere," screamed my oldest, and then she started to gag also. And it was everywhere, including covering the five bags of groceries I had just barely bought and placed on the car floor in front of my babies car seat. Rookie mistake. Once home I removed a slippery stinking goo covered child from her seat and carried her straight into the bathroom, leaving of trail of grossness in our wake. I washed her and cradled her and rocked her to sleep, cleaned myself up, cleaned the bathroom, the hallway, started the washing machine, and then remembered the van. The puke devastated minivan. Mother Trucker. Once again I scooped and scraped and scrubbed. The van was clean, clean car seat, puke covered me. I looked at the five bags of ruined groceries. Should I try to salvage them? On one had they were covered in vomit, on the other had they had cost me roughly seventy bucks.

"What's for dinner?" my husband queried as he came in the door from work. Don't ask honey, just don't ask!

That night as I collapsed into bed only slightly more exhausted than usual I remembered a guest panel I had recently sat on at a local college. It was a career planning course, taught by a friend, consisting only of freshmen girls, and I was there to talk to them about being a stay at home mom. They asked questions, me and two other mothers gave advice.

"What's hardest about being a stay at home mom?" Uh, ya they came out with the heavy hitters right away. How to explain. How to tell these sweet innocent doe eyed girls about the horrors of cesarean scars and lack of a private moment ever. E V E R! That they would be in charge of keeping a helpless little living human alive, and fed and clean. Not only cared for but well adjusted and kind and compassionate and a million other things. That the career choice of motherhood meant no quiting time, no coffee breaks, no paid vacation. That on their best days they would look beraggled and on their worst days like three shades of hell warmed over. What were they doing thinking about motherhood anyway? I wanted to scream at them to bloody well finish college, run away to Italy for a year, get something pierced or tattooed, you are only babies yourselves! What I settled on saying was that being a mom is great, the best and hardest thing I had ever done, and that they should worry about giving birth to themselves first. I hope it stuck.

As I picked a chunk of who knows what out of my hair I thought about the freshmen girl who wanted to know how you handle the icky stuff.

"You know," she had said, "like the bloody noses and scraped knees and poo and stuff. That's gross and I don't think I could do that."

I started to laugh hysterically. Motherhood is the icky stuff. It is buggers on your shirt, and the five second rule. It is four people sharing the same spoon without blinking. It is crusty and messy and sticky. You will count down the days until its over, and then cry like a baby when it really is. You will never ever love so hard. The love will fill you up right in that spot under your rib cage until it hurts and you think you might burst with love. Then your daughter will lay her soft cheek on your shoulder and her downy curls with brush against your face and all your bones and joints will creek and groan with the weight of that love. And that's what you will get for braving the icky stuff.

30 days keeping the darkness at bay.

  A month has passed since that terrible day.   That day when a nightmare entered our living rooms by way of a television a screen.   Each parents worst nightmare playing out on continuous repeat as we learned the name Sandy Hook.   That night I slept in restless fits.  I walked the hall of my little house checking and rechecking on my precious daughters, both obliviously lost in peaceful dreams.   Around six am the flood gates finally broke.   I sobbed into a couch cushion,  consumed with grief.  With the grief I imagined was being felt on the other side of the country,  and God knows, I could never fully understand.   Grief sent like a massive shockwave across a nation with a broken heart.

   The next morning I timed the 18 minute drive to my daughters school.   Mentally making a ridiculous plan of action if anything should ever happen.  If I sped and ran all the lights I could be there in 15... and I could leave the baby with a  neighbor if I had to.  Because, that's what we do as mothers.   We imagine every worst case scenario and  hundreds of heroic solutions.  A twisted insurance plan.  I try to outsmart the unknown and shore myself up against possible heartache.   Always be prepared.   As if thinking it through could somehow keep the darkness away. 

  In effort to curb the tears that never seem to end my husband soon banned all news media from our home.   Which was probably for the best.   Just a glimpse of one of those little faces sends me headlong over a cliff of despair.  Pictures of six year olds with earnest trusting eyes. Six year olds that wont get to open Christmas presents that have already been bought and wrapped by adoring mothers. It is all so unspeakable and too much to bear.  "You can't live your life in fear," my husband whispers softly and I know he's right. It is not so much that I fear this happening in my town or to my child.  Maybe I am foolish in that regard.   Mostly I am grieving.  If I fear anything,  it is that this country might loose its soul if it doesn't come together under the weight of this tragedy to find a solution.

 When I pick up  Ella from second grade she spouts off the erie details of "intruder drills" and panic rises in my throat.   She says how they all huddled together in the corner of the classroom and couldn't make any noise or move for five minutes.   My heart aches and stretches as I remember the simple innocence of my childhood,  something she won't experience.   I stare at two little immunized,  well harnessed,  organic fed girls through my rear view mirror and wonder how I will ever get them safely to the other side.  Can the words "I love you," ever be enough ?  If I arm them with forgiveness and compassion,  with hope and wonder can those things add up to being enough?   
The words of J R R Tolkien ring like a bell for me and give me peace in a time when peace is hard to find:

"Some believe that it is only great power that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I have found. I've found it is the small things. Everyday deeds by ordinary folk that keeps the darkness at bay."

   And I pray that is true, because it has been a month and we'll never forget what the darkness looks like.

Fall Funk

  Of all the seasons Autumn is my favorite.  I know, I know I said the same thing about summer at its start, and the same thing about spring when it finally arrived. Okay, Autumn is definitely in my top three. Winter and I have a love hate relationship.  Winter is a necessary evil like pantyhose and the dentist. Without winter the other seasons would never be so dramatic, so anticipated and shocking in their delights.   Back to Autumn.  There is nothing that gets my creative juices flowing like a crisp fall morning.  I love watching the leaves turn bright and then brittle with anticipation of all the excitement to come.  From September to new years my life is a literal flurry of activities and parties. My birthday, Canadian thanksgiving, Halloween, Ella's birthday, American Thanksgiving,  CHRISTMAS, my anniversary.  (One of the best things about being a Canuck living in the states is two thanksgivings!)  This year my creative juices refused to flow.  Each time I would sit at the computer to write, or pick up a paint brush, or even browse through pinterest: c r i c k e t s.   Only me and the sound of silence.

  I haven't been able to figure out or overcome this mountain of blah for weeks.  The whole creative hiatus has left me a little out of sorts.  I need creative outlets to stay sane,  keep myself from locking children in their bedrooms and throwing heavy objects at husband.   This morning the fog finally lifted and I know who is to blame.  Uncle Sam.  The election has been wrecking autumn, one of my three favorite seasons! A huge political haze has been hanging over us all.  There has been so much political static electricity in the air, poor facebook has become a landmine of opinions.  I think my inner-self decided to duck and cover a couple of months ago.  I don't have any opinions or political sound bites to share with you this morning. (I have them I just refuse to share them.)   Consider that my early Christmas gift to you.  This is an open invitation to all my friends no matter which side of the fence they sit on.  Pop on over to my house.  There are pumpkin muffins in the oven,  craft projects spread out across the dinning room table and Christmas music on the radio.   Everything is going to be alright.


PS  -  A brave princess and her wise little owl showed up for Halloween :)

 

Renaissance of Wonder

                We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic  -E Merrill Root

 What is being a mother if not a revival of our own childhood?   My daughters do me the great honor of letting me see the world through their eyes.  When I catch a little moment of their magic,  when I get caught up in their wonder,  it fills me up.   All the world is set right.  On our trip to the zoo my baby girl stood up against the aquarium with the big kids.  She pressed her nose to the glass and chortled as the sea lions sailed by.   She kept looking back at me as if to say "Are you seeing this?   Hey mom,  are you really seeing this?"  Yes baby girl,  I see it.  And it is wonderful!

How to watch Downton Abbey season 3 NOW!

I really wanted to call this post "Do it like a Brit."  But then I thought that might drive the wrong kind of traffic to my blog.  If you do want to watch Downton Abbey like a Brit,  with our friends across the pond, then you have come to the right place!  Since the new season doesn't air in the US until January and I never was known for my patience I did a little research and came up with a couple of fool proof plans.  First, some eye candy.

 

Been raiding my closet again ladies?

 

 

 

 

                            Oh Mathew, don't look at me like that! (on second thought, please do!)
                                      
If you want to watch, here’s all you have to do:

1. Download Tunnel Bear.

2. Install TunnelBear.

3. Create an account for TunnelBear and pay the $4.99/month for unlimited bandwidth– the free 500 MB is not enough. 

4. Turn on TunnelBear and switch the dials to “On” and “UK”

5. Open a new browser window

.6. Go to the iTV player

Click on the Downton Abbey _ watch, let the english grandeur roll over you, as you salivate and wonder why you couldn't be born in the 1920's

If you have an HDMI cord for your tv then you can hook up your computer to your tv and watch it in full screen glory.  Also on iTv the adds are British which I feel is an added bonus. Commercials with an english accent are so less irritating than ones without.

Call you sister or best friend to brag that you got to watch the new season, and after sufficient bragging direct them to these instructions.

Love letters

I recently came across a beautiful blog where the author shared some of her old love letters from over the years. They ranged from comical to deeply romantic and personal, as different as each love. Feeling inspired I decided to brave our very scary basement, digging through boxes of old memories. I hunted and sifted through piles of saved treasures from over the years, sure that I had saved and could thus unearth some romantic old letters. Curated so that I could someday show them to my daughters and remember the breathless flush of my first young love. What I excavated with was not exactly what I expected.

My first ever "love letter" was a note passed to me during math class in the seventh grade. The cutest boy in school told me in the note that he really liked me (squeal) and then proceeded to go on and on about the girl he use to like that he didn't like anymore. Looking at it with grown up eyes it was more a hate letter for her than a love letter for me. Maybe it was a bad omen of things to come. The letters and notes didn't get much better. There was one scribbled on a napkin by a boy I briefly dated during university. It read "You smell good and your butt looks good in those pants, when do you get off work? I need a backrub." What a Casanova. I sifted and searched and sifted and searched some more. There were letters from one guy who told me that some girls were like Christmas lights, and I was like the lights that twinkle. Sweet, but probably directly off a Hallmark card.

I uncovered a few longer letters with guarded hints of love and adoration. Dozens of sweet letters until one day they proclaimed a new indifference. Indifference, I think, is the worst way to feel about a person. I would take hate over indifference any day. I sat on the cold basement floor, staring at this letter. I looked at a picture of me and this indifferent boy that had been carefully folded inside. I felt a twinge of remembrance, the slightest pain of sadness and mild annoyance that my love letter hunt had devolved into such a bust. Just then my seven year old peeped over my shoulder.

"What is that?" she asked.

"Who is that?" she demanded before I had a chance to answer.

"Oh, that is a boy who use to be my boyfriend a long long time ago before I met your daddy." I told her a bit too wistfully. She leaned her head on my shoulder gently and then.....burst into laughter. Huge bursts of laughter that made her little belly shake. "His head", she puffed and squealed. "His head is the size of a water melon." With that she bounded out of the room still laughing to herself, pausing at the top of the stairs to call back down with dramatic hilarity "the siiizzze of a WATERMELON."

My daughter, my sweet darling daughter. In many ways my one true love. So funny. So loyal (to her most romantic and handsome father who has written me many many a love letter, and a few very bad poems.) I shoved all the sub-par romance from my past back into the box and kicked it for good measure to the back of the storage closet. I ran up the stairs to my room and grabbed a different box. I dumped it on the bed... a hundred or so love notes from Ella. Precious little scraps saved since she was tiny (which was five minutes ago as I have already established.) Pictures she drew for me, birthday cards, little notes she use to hide around the house. Scribbly squiggly barley readable characters written by the chubby clumsy fingers of a child just learning to write. I love you mommy. You are the best mommy. Thank you for being my mommy. My heart began to flutter and dance. My little true love. Turns out I didn't need to dig so deep. My very best love letters, the ones worth saving and sharing are definitely part of my present.

Ella: Mom you can just drop me off right here.
Me: Whhhattt? (equal parts whine and panic)
Ella: Come on Mom, I am in second grade, I am way to big to have you walk me into school.

And then she gives me that look. That look that says - I am not willing to deal with your over-protective neurosis right at this particular moment. And she is right, I know she is right. Its just that she was my baby like five minutes minutes ago. "Just a second" I shriek out the window as I fumble for the camera on my phone. And this is it, the only first day of school photo I manage to snap. Out the window of my minivan. Mom fail. She already seems so big, and so far away from me. As I round the corner at the bottom of the hill it hits me and the tears start to fall. They surprise me because if I am honest I have been counting down the days. I mean, despite summer camps, and swimming, and trips to Nana's I am apparently the most boring person on the face of the universe. Please second grade teacher take this child off my hands and teach her some manners and appreciation if you don't mind. But the tears come anyway. I call my sister who is in the hospital holding a precious three day old baby, Rosemary, against her chest. "Brace yourself", I manage through hicuppy sobs, "you will be sending her to second grade in about five minutes".

Homecoming

Every year it's seems like my visits home to Canada get fewer and further. I love spending time with my family, but we most often meet at the lake in Montana. It is fun and alluring and "home" gets neglected. I have friends who have moved far away that get the shakes about going home, and others that love it. It is always a mixed bag for me. I seem to have grown up in spite of myself, but when I go home I can never keep track of how old I am. It is only in Lethbridge that I am catapulted backwards. I am suddenly a tangle of emotions. I am brash and brave as I jump off a bridge into murky irrigation waters. I am in the throws of my first broken heart. I am running wild with ranch grown boys long after the hour that my parents would like me home in bed. Time is no longer linear but fluid and tricky. It is so hard for me to get a grip on time there that I stare hard at the faces I pass by at the store, trying to get a glimpse of myself. Is she older or younger, do I have wrinkles like that or not yet? Please not yet. As my husband laughs and laments I can't walk five feet in the mall without running into someone I know. These are my people, not the faceless crowd I am used to in Salt Lake. After ten years they are as much strangers as kin. Coming home is usually comforting and disconcerting all at the same time (if that is even possible).

When I feel myself lost in time, as I do there, my capacity to embrace change is challenged. I find comfort in the vast surroundings of Lethbridge that never seem to change. Miles and miles of precious ranch and farmland, made more romantic by tales of ancestors who lived on it, worked it, and loved it. My heart fills and I wax poetic- be forewarned. Driving through the mountains and down out of the foothills the prairie unfolds and then breaks open into unspoiled vistas that can shatter the ceiling of your imagination.

Visiting Waterton on my trip home felt like coming back to an old love. I apologize sweet Waterton for cheating on you with Montana and Glacier park. ( you know you've always been my one true love!). Standing with my toes in the lake there I think for a minute I can almost glimpse eternity. Isn't the trickiest thing about this life being born with eternity in your heart and a ticking clock around your neck? We are forced to live within the confines of time while thirsting after immortality. For me, it is there, the two can almost meet up for a moment. As I watch my daughter throwing rocks in the lake, rippling ceaselessly outward, I don't mind that my handle on time is not the firm grip I once believed it to be.

I realize that going home gives me a chance to be all pieces of myself at once. Daughter, grandchild, sister, mother, adult. All the time changing, all the time staying the same. As I drive back south to a crowded city where everyone is always in a hurry, I have the wind in my hair and a song in my heart. I am thankful for the place I still call home.

I'm a Mormon and a Christian, but I wish I was Hindu.

I have a confession, I'm not that political. Lately there has been a lot of political chatter. Politics, religion and politicals, Mormonism and religion, Mormonism and politics. Thanks a lot Mitt Romney. I try not to get involved in that discussion, but it is kind of hard. Especially since I am a Mormon and the Mormon church has this new campaign "I'm so and so and I am a Mormon". Where normal people and famous people who are Mormon can go online and enthusiastically share their beliefs in attempt to make us (Mormons) appear more normal. How is that working out I wonder?

As crazy right wing Christians and atheists and everyone in between love to point out, Mormons aren't that normal. That is a sentiment I can get behind. We are a little unique in our religious beliefs and down right quirky in our social customs. We tend to take ourselves too seriously and sometimes blur the lines between righteous and self-righteous. We do believe in Jesus Christ, the technical name of our religion is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. Kind of a mouthful, so I don't mind if you just call me mormon. I know lot of Mormons who spend a lot of time defending our Christianity. They get into heated debates and toss around scriptures and historical references to things like the Nicean creed. I don't really understand the debate. Obviously, we believe in who we believe in. Not obvious, why we spend so much time getting so worked up about proving it.

The other day I was on the phone with this guy in Montana who wanted to rent our house up there. He was pleasant, excited and interested and then right as we ended the conversation he threw out "by the way, your not Mormon are you?". Uummm, yes it just so happens I am and it was kind of hard to stifle my inner chuckle. He got all gruff and serious and was all "never mind, it won't work out". To which I replied "would it help if I wished I were hindu". And then he hung up on me. I guess he's had a bad experience with a jerky Mormon. I know a few of those myself, sometimes I even am one. Almost every Mormon I know is imperfect in some way or another. Same with every Catholic, Jew, Protestant, Muslim, ect ect. It's true, almost everyone I know is imperfect...... and beautiful. Maybe made most beautiful by their flaws, or at the very least by their differences.

If I count up all the differences and the similarities between my religion and other religions and put them in a pile, I don't know which pile would be bigger. The older I get the less I think it matters. The less I want to pay attention to the differences pile. This might be a little un-Mormon of me. Mormons are typically a little hard nosed about towing the line and keeping the rules. You know, the getting into heaven rules. I am not that great at keeping rules. That's what makes me wish I was Hindu. I might need to come back a few times before I get it right. I like how we believe in immortality, but who really knows what heaven ( or hell depending wink wink) is really like. I know this life, I love it. I can't get enough of this crazy, messy, imperfect life or this fantastically beautiful breathtaking world. I would like to experience as much of it as I can for as long as possible. Even if it is as a cat.

P.S. : Don't worry about the rude Mormon hater too much. I had his address on his application and got karmic retribution by sending him a Book of Mormon in the mail.

PPS: if you are interested in learning more about the Mormon religion from a more credible source you should visit Lds.org