A brown paper package arrived in the mail today from Val...

Dear Ashley,

I am sending you this dress as I know you will look lovely in it. It was an expensive dress that was given to me years ago. Unfortunately, the bust was always toooooooo big and I felt self-conscious anytime I wore it. Now that you have these enormous boobs, it should be perfect on you. With the V neck you should be able to wear it out sometime to a special 'do' where Sloane is accompanying you (no problem for breastfeeding). ...The colours were also not suitable for me. You look great in these colours though, and I am sure it will be very becoming on you.

I have hand-washed it today - it is hand-washable (as the tag says). I turned it inside-out to wash it. Let me know if this dress looks good on you......I hope so.

Love Mum

Really brings out my eyes!

(Thanks Mum.)

Categories: Family

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Sloane's Two-Month Checkup

Oh, needles. We all hate them. My mother tells the story of my immunizations at 3 years old, where they had to get three more McKeller Hospital nurses and orderlies to hold me down on the table, I was fighting so hard. (Eventually I had so many needles with the Hodgekin's that now I'm fabulously fearless in person... though I can't watch people shooting up on tv. Dunno.) Turner still has a well-known phobia of needles, going green and passing out at the sight of sharps and the scent of rubbing alcohol. So guess which of us had to hold the baby when we took her in for her vaccinations on Friday? Yep.

The two-month checkup: a photo essay.

Our "local" health clinic, on Calgary's seedy east side. Formerly a lovely little town on the outskirts of the city, Forest Lawn is now home to lots of interesting immigrant communities and some of the trashiest white people in Calgary. Come for the pho, the Punjabi cloth shops, the Shun Fat Chinese grocer, the Latino market... stay for the pit bull breeders, the pawn shops/porn shops/used vacuum shops, and the lottery/crack addicts.

The smiling smiler weighs in at 11lbs, a good gain from her last checkup.

Measuring Sloane's length - 22 inches or so of burbling baby.

Official head circumference = Sloane, neither a pinhead nor a cranius maximus.

And now, the moment of truth.

"Before." Immediately after this picture was taken, Turner went out to wait in the hallway.

"After". Roused by our babygirl's screams, Turner returned to document the aftermath of the scheduled torture (intramuscular, in the thigh - 2 in the left, one in the right).

The miracle of modern medicine, and the blessing of a public health care system - vaccinations for all (at least, all whose parents will allow them to be immunized against the world's worst childhood diseases, for free).

Waiting the obligatory 15 minutes in the lobby, in case of anaphylactic shock.

Categories: Dad-ness | Mom-ness | Sloane

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Sloane's Pictoral Week In Review: 10.0

Gramma Margo arrived on Saturday from Halifax for a two-week visit with her first granddaughter!

Categories: Sloane

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The Gift Parade

Though still a work in progress, many of the gifts we've received are now on display at Sloane's site, here. An embarrassment of riches, it is indeed!

Categories: Sloane

Comments [11]

Oh, So This Is What Happens

Sloane and I are sitting here watching the CBC coverage of the Queen's visit to Canada on television. Today they're celebrating the public kick-off of Alberta's Centennial (1905-2005) and the party-tastic farewell to Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Expository scene setting, this.

And, among other things, it occurs to us: given all the pomp and ceremony and the Empire (hurrah, Empire), the travel and wealth and singular position and all that, the Queen has to have seen just about everything the world has to offer in terms of pageantry, don't you think? As today's "entertainment" we Albertans shuffle out on stage and sing this half-assed-muzak no-one-will-remember-it-in-five-minutes "We Are Alberta" song, and during the endless instrumental choruses there's a parade of twenty-second bits from a variety of cultural communities: the Chinese with dragons, the T'suu T'ina nation with native dances, the police pipe band and Irish step dancers, the Ukrainians straddle-jumping their hearts out. Then a "Four Winds of Alberta" song that the hosts tell us to sing along with (I've lived in Alberta most of my life and I've never even heard of this song), and then it's "Alberta Bound" at a bizarre chipmunk pace... it goes on and on.

It makes me feel for the Queen. I think it's great for all the people involved that they got to shimmy and two-step and yee-haw yip yip Calgary-style for the reigning monarch... but good god, the Queen herself must be bored. You think she hasn't seen this kind of thing before? A zillion times? Bored, borrrrrrrred, BORED. Bored!

You hear a lot about how useless the monarchy is. A drain on the system. Functionless, a dead symbol. But I defy anyone who managed to catch today's extravaganza in person or on television to stand behind such claims. Because if it demonstrated nothing else about her, truly the Queen has a clear and unwavering idea of her job. (This compliment/observation/analysis has been made by many royal watchers far better informed on such matters than I.) She sat through the whole thing without so much as a squirm. You may not agree that she should be on the money, and you may not like that the governor-general represents her in Canada. But I saw a melodramatic and confusing lightshow, countless Canadian and Alberta flags being shaken in the crowd, and Mayor Dave "Bronco" Bronconnier wearing his chains of office and showing the Queen to her chair. And more importantly, I saw a whole lot of thrilled children, grateful and teary seniors, proud servicepeople in uniform, and hundreds of adults dancing around in shamelessly hokey outfits to deeply mediocre music with huge grins on their faces. That means something.

And it's all taking place at the Saddledome, which is a mere four hundred metres from where we're sitting, just across the river. We listened to the 21-gun salute to the Queen out the open front door as they blasted away with the cannons up on the hill. Tickets to the event were free, and even though I knew it would be this - an embarrassing and overlong yawnfest run by Calgary's socialite hairspray brigade - I admit I wanted to go. I've never seen the Queen in person, and I pictured myself standing at the side of the road waving at her car with my baby daughter in my arms. (And who am I kidding, I'm the type who'd cry and smile and be so happy just to catch a glimpse. Cornball!) C'mon, when is the Queen ever again going to be in situ four hundred metres from my livingroom? Never, that's when. But - yeah, well... we wanted to go, but, well... there's the baby, now.

I certainly don't mind watching the Queen on tv while my incredible baby daughter rocks back and forth in her swing, beside me here. I'd rather be here with Sloane than anywhere else, certainly. However, I've been visited with a sudden bolt of insight, today. One of those flashes of understanding that's deeply obvious, and yet entirely elusive until your life and experience drives you right up to the front door and rings the bell: Ding ding ding! INSIGHT TELEGRAM! It's this: I never understood when we'd miss something big when we were kids. "Why didn't we go?" I'd pester, later, wanting to know. "Howcome I didn't stay home from school for the eclipse?" and, "Why didn't we all go to the Canada-Russia game?" -- that sort of thing. And mum would sort of look off in the middle distance, like she was trying to remember, and she'd try and make whatever it was sound boring, not even worth recalling, really, and she'd say, "Oh, well - we couldn't...but it didn't matter..." or, "Um, I don't remember! Something else was happening..." I never thought these reasons were any kind of good enough as a kid, me.

I dunno for sure, but someday Sloane might hear that the Queen was here in Calgary just after she was born. "Did we go, Mum? Did we see the Queen when she was here? That was her last trip to Canada, wasn't it?" And how do you tell the plain boring truth, "Sometimes you just can't get your shit together to do that kind of thing when you have a little kid, dear"? How do you properly explain that on the day the Queen was in Calgary (four hundred metres from the house) you didn't brush your hair until after... wait - what time is it now? ...And that lunch was two popsicles between loads of laundry while the baby napped, and that even to type this blog entry the child was strapped into the swingomatic for much longer than probably would be considered "best". Nope - can't say that stuff, not really. So when Sloane asks why we didn't go, I'll have to look off into the middle distance, and vaguely say, "Well...I don't remember. Something was happening, I think...But you and I watched it on tv - it was dumb. Hokey."

God Save The Queen, y'all!

Categories: Mom-ness

Comments [14]

Sloane's Pictoral Week In Review: 9.0

Our newly insomnic child has been staying up night and day poring over her "Yummy, Yucky" text in preparation for the final.

Categories: Sloane

Comments [13]

If You Ever Wanted To See Me Naked (And Haven't Already), Now's Your Chance

Breastfeeding involves at least a measure of nakedness, on purpose and often also by accident. The whole notion of feeding your kid using the boob does require letting the child actually get at the feeding "equipment" - which obviously involves getting clothes out of the way. I'm lucky in that I've never had a problem with modesty when it comes to nakedness - not that I'm outright exhibitionist, though nor am I the type to wear overly revealing clothing out of the house on even a periodic basis. ("Low modesty" does not automatically translate to "skanky".) I've long taken the approach, for example, that if I needed to change my clothes, say, in a car, and someone were to come along and accidentally see me changing, there's nothing to be embarrassed about. Regular body issues aside, I've never had any hangups about the propriety of nudity.

I know a few women who need to be completely naked to properly breastfeed (I presume they wear underwear when they're on the furniture); I'm not this sort. Around the house I'm usually wearing loose clothes that are easily hike-up-able for whenever Sloane needs a snack. When I go out I dutifully wear a nursing bra, not because of their particular utility, but rather because, since the moment I conceived last June, I couldn't possibly strap myself into any of my old bras. (Anyone who'd like a huge sack of lovely, expensive 36C brassieres may be in touch to claim your prize - I won't be wearing them anytime soon, up here at the 40DD end of the spectrum.) These days I do put a bit of thought into the versatility of the shirts I wear when I'm going out on the town with Sloane, but I'm back into most of my pre-pregnancy tops and bang out the door without too much fuss in that department.

Now, breastfeeding in public is something you either decide you'll do, or you won't do. Me, I'm a do-er. I need to get the hell out of Chez Bristowe Turner on a daily basis or I get pretty cabin feverish. And inevitably, when I'm out, at some point Sloane gets hungry. Trying to schedule feedings for an infant is like herding cats. I don't care what you've read or who told you they had their 6-week-old on a 3hr timetable. Those Baby Whisperer books are good for coasters and those overachieving schedulizer people are lying liarpants liars. I'll tell you true: kids'll eat when they need to eat. Sloane is about the easiest baby I've ever even heard of, and even she has a rollercoaster 'schedule', eating all over the map, all day long. Sure, someday kids get to the "breakfast", "lunch", and "dinner" stage, but when they're babies, no sir. So you have to be ready, if you leave the house with the kid in tow, to feed 'em, anytime, anywhere.

When I'm out and about and it's time to feed our girl, I do make an effort to drape up a receiving blanket or the edge of my sweater and whatnot to keep the public nudity to a minimum. But I'll be honest - I don't really care who sees the breastfeeding. There's a rumour going around the pregnant & postpartum set these days that Starbucks doesn't allow ladies to breastfeed in their coffee shops. In prenatal aquafit classes and baby shower barbeques across the land you hear women proclaiming that as soon as their kid is born, they'll troop off to their local Starbucks to Fight The Power... but I've never heard how these field trips turn out. I've yanked up my sweater in the Canmore IGA, in Devonian Gardens downtown, on the Greyhound bus, and on a park bench beside the Elbow River pathway. And if I'm ever in Starbucks and Sloane gets a rumbly tummy, I'll let you know how things turn out in the late great Starbucks-vs.-the-Women's-Studies-Major test match. The bottom line is, however, that if my child is hungry and needs to eat, I'll feed her. I don't care who doesn't approve, and I don't care who's watching.

So if you, as a private citizen, have a problem with a woman breastfeeding in public, I'll thank you now for keeping your repressed little Victorian opinions to yourself. And if you get your big whup from watching an infant eat, as nature designed, at the breast - dooode, get over it. I've heard a few women talk about the looks they got on such occasions, in particular from young men - middlingly offensive and half-uncomprehending stares, presumably the result of post-pubescent arousal unceremoniously choked off by the obvious and immediate utility of the organ on display. In the words of our birthing class instructor, "As the mother of a teenage boy, I THANK you for breastfeeding in public. Those little bastards need to learn sometime that breasts have another job to do."

And really, any lactation consultant will tell you that it's best to give your nipples as much 'air time' as possible. So get out and feed those anklebiters in the mall. I'll see you there!

Categories: Mom-ness

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Maybe It's Just The Boob Talking

Like all breastfeeding moms, I am chained by the nipples to my child's feeding schedule. By "schedule" I mean the vaguest notion of regularity with which my boobs fill with milk, and thence my daughter feeds. It's all a bit mysterious and spiritual, watching another being grow and thrive, nourished exclusively by milk you produce - I do admit. But aside from periodic moments where you ken the weirdness and One-ness of the situation, it normalizes pretty fast, and soon you find yourself casually craning your neck over the kid and its flailing arms, to read the Globe and Mail weekend Review section, mid-feed. Feedings happen every one to four hours, around the clock, and every breastfeeding mom will tell you that being the sole provider of sustenance for the baby does mess with your sleep. Mostly I was doing fine - I was exhausted, so I'd nap with Sloane in the afternoon, and zonk out early once she was down for the night.

But in Nakusp I threw off my sleeping schedule. Everything went all to hell up there with the fresh mountain air and the early bedtimes - and the windchimes clanging away all night, outside the window. For the first few days Sloane and I were sleeping in two single beds pushed together, and I spent the night hours with one eye open, terrified that she'd roll off or slip between the mattresses and suffocate. And with all the animals around, there was endless paranoia about cats coming in to scratch her and the dogs running off with Sloane in their jaws (just to play). Turner stayed in Calgary for the first week, so I was there by myself, and I ended up a sleepless wreck by day three. Eventually we switched to the basement room with the double bed, and once Turner arrived I could put in both earplugs at night. But Sloane had a few crazy days of screaming into the wee hours, and the night before we returned to Calgary I didn't sleep at all.

In any case, as a result I'm all turned around and very chronically overtired. Now, I know all new moms are tired. There's no shortage of advance warning of this part of becoming a mother. And sure, I'm well aware that I get LOTS more sleep than the average new parent. Sloane is usually a pretty easy baby, and fairly regular in her sleep habits. And since Turner works from home, I get a lot of breaks in the day to get my own stuff done - showering, eating, etc. - unlike many other moms. I know I'm lucky. But shit, right now I'm seriously bug-eyed: bagged, roasted, done.  

I'm somehow so chronically overtired at this point that I've entered a whole new realm of exhaustion. As a lifelong insomniac, I have to admit that it's been perversely fascinating to find that there could possibly be a type of "tired" that I hadn't yet experienced before now. In my current zombie incarnation I can talk, drive, do email, and generally carry on with life and parenting my daughter. But... I kind of randomly lose my balance at times. Like, at least a few times a day, with no warning. And I forget to eat. I never thought this would be an honest-to-goodness afflication in my life, but serious and for true, some days I forget to eat. (And then I remember and I'm starving to fricken death and it's at the emergency need-to-eat!!! stage.)

But worst of all, I CAN'T FALL ASLEEP. I can't nap, I can't rest, and I can't fall asleep at night when I go to bed. I lie there awake. I lie there thinking about the gardening I'd do if I could convince Sloane that the bouncy seat is her friend. And I think about the home renovations I'd do if we had the money (and if our lot wasn't zoned R2 and the next person to own this property wasn't likely going to tear the house down and build one of them spankin' new duplex units and make a killing selling them off to gentrificationeezers).

...And I think about the fact that we don't have life insurance yet (Monday - we're getting it on Monday. For sure, Monday...) and what would happen to Sloane if we both died in a firey car crash? And - terrible, terrible - I worry that I might, in my buggy, sleep-deprived state, forget Sloane somewhere, like in the basement when I'm doing laundry. What if I forgot her and she got lonely and frightened? What if Sloane was asleep in her basket, and I didn't hear her wake up somehow, and I got all caught up doing work on the computer, and lost track of time, and she got hungry and scared? What if I accidently left her in the car after coming home from groceries? And she got heat stroke in the car with the windows closed? Good god. What then? WHAT THEN!?

Yeah... I'm not doing myself any favours with all this, I realize. And I do know that every parent has these anxieties and that they're normal. But not getting enough sleep just exacerbates the spiral. I can't fall asleep so good these days, and it's not helping the being-overtired-and-exhausted situation, or the resulting obsession with delusional fears.  

Now, once I'm asleep, things are okay. I'm sleeping, it's all good, I get up for the mid-night feed at 3:30am, but I clunk back to sleep and I can keep sleeping. ...But then there's the morning feed. The downfall. The sun is up, the sky is bright outside the slatted blinds of our bedroom window, and if I wake up to feed Sloane, the ol' hypothalamus kicks into gear and the seritonin gets released and I'm up for the day, bone-tired or no.

I pretty quickly realized something had to be done, or I was going to really end up mental. Or collapsing, at the very least. I figured, Sure, I think I can drive now, but what happens when I fall asleep at the wheel after a few more weeks of this? The exhaustion-fuelled anxieties coming to life as a result of less and less ability to function properly..? I couldn't let it go on. So we've instituted a new routine, my stellar husband and I. It's for now, until further notice, so that I can get something resembling a proper night's sleep (ha), by making up the time in the morning. Turner gives Sloane her morning feed with expressed breastmilk, and then they have a nap together on the couch. (Really a darling scene; I've taken a number of photos of different morning naps with them curled up asleep, together - one example is here) Simple, really.

I get to sleep for as long as my boobs will let me - recall that by this time I haven't fed my child since the middle of the night, so there's a bunch of milk getting backlogged in the works. Not so comfortable. It'll wake you up eventually, in fact, the surfeit of milk. So I sleep for as long as I can, and then I get up and pump the next day's morning feed, and I'm up for the day (hypothalamus, seritonin, etc. as mentioned earlier).

This new routine has me spending a fair bit of contemplative time with my breast pump.  

Dig that bottle, all full of milk. That came from me. It's food. It's for Sloane, my daughter. It nourishes her. ...Mysterious! ...Spiritual!

Absolutely, I can better appreciate the genius of nature - the weirdness and One-ness, if you will - on a few more hours' sleep. At least, lately.  

Categories: Mom-ness

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Sloane's Pictoral Week In Review: 8.0

Look at this frickin GENIUS of a child we've produced - she sucks her fist!! Yesssssssss!

(WHOO!!)

Categories: Sloane

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Thank You, Mary Elizabeth!

Last Christmas Turner and I were showered with amazing gifts. Avalanched, really. We celebrated in Nakusp with my family, and as per our tradition, there's one "Santa" who stands up and hands out presents one by one from under the tree. (In recent years Val has replaced the standard real tree with a blinking singing porcelain number that sits on the tea drawer. We pile the presents on top of the drawers. Yes, Mom lives on 40 acres of trees trees and more trees, but we worship a blinking singing porcelain ornament thingee, now. It's called "progress", I think.) The Santa tries to vary the recipients so everyone gets a turn and no one gets bored. But this year it all fell apart - midway through it was obvious that Turner and I had gotten so many gifts we'd dominate the whole second half of Christmas morning, ourselves. Every year in every family someone gets accidently bonked with the present largesse stick - where their haul is disproportionately large in comparison to everyone else - and this year it was us, but golly, the largesse... it was humbling.

Among the many awesome gifts was the McConnell Family Gift Swap gift for me from Turner's aunt Mary Elizabeth. Originally from Antigonish, Mary E has called the US home for many years. Turner will tell you that I am a great fan of Mary E's accent, a blend of Nova Scotian and New England tones (resulting in, most famously, a superb rendition of any word with a double-o sound: shoes, food, new, etc.). In any case, Mary Elizabeth gave me a lovely plaid mohair blanket.

Super gift, and I squealed. But people, I had NO IDEA how prescient and useful an item that blanket would become.

It buys my sanity each and every day, that mohair blanket. She's a great baby, but even Sloane cries and can't be soothed. Except - except by the mohair. The mohair is the Sai Baba of crying solutions: it knows all, loves all. Cheers, Mary E.

Categories: Sloane

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Tell It To The Bear

INT: Kitchen. Ash is washing out the breast pump at the sink, Turner is soothing Sloane, hum-singing to her as he sock-skates around the table.

Ash:       [Stops, listens, recognizes the tune] ...You knooooowwww, when Rolling Stone goes back to printing good journalism and they want you for the cover, and you try to wear a "Corporate Magazines Still Suck" tshirt*, I'm gunna tell them you sang your daughter to sleep with the A&W theme song.

Turner:    ...I think it was something already, before it was the A&W song.

Ash:       Shuuuuure it was.

*Turner, a big Nirvava fan, has their 1992 Rolling Stone cover framed in his office. Kurt Cobain is wearing a hastily hand-lettered white tshirt bearing these words.

Categories: Dad-ness

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Sloane's Pictoral Week In Review: 7.0

Taken only moments ago, after several hours' worth of jiggling, rocking and general all-around singing-to-sleep type stuff, this photo is absolutely representative of this week's theme: ...Sleeping? Nah.

Categories: Sloane

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She's Her Mother's Daughter

Uhhh, well... it seems our daughter has decided that she's going to take after me, at least in one respect.

I have a well-known predilection for the feel of polyester satin material. When I was a baby I had a blanket that was edged with satin; friends and family know I have long carried around a half-metre swatch of satin nearly everywhere I go. I've loved having a baba - something the world generally considers a "security blanket". I've always thought it a wonderful, harmless addiction that gives so much, and asks nothing in return. It's also been an interesting peek into other people's psyches, the experience of being an adult with a 'blankie'. Family and strangers alike are always and unconsciously kind when it comes to being in proximity to something which provides such a clear and base comfort. Countless times have I accidentally dropped my swatch in public, and found it snatched off the floor or table and quickly handed back to me by someone else, this look of You dropped this faberge egg! on their face, often before I was even able to turn around. Witnessing another person openly holding and petting a blanket touches something in people, I've realized. It's a tiny gift you give to the world, letting yourself be laid so bare and open and clear in this way.

Now, I should disclose right off the bat the fact that, in my family, having a blanket or sucking a thumb is nothing to be ashamed of. Of thirteen grandchildren on my dad's side, nine of the cousins were or still are thumbsuckers and/or blanket-havers - might I add, children themselves of my aunts and uncles who were, most of them, proudly of the same ilk and inclination. So I come by my attitude honestly and from a strong cohort.

Turner'll tell you that me and my whole family have been waiting and hoping that Sloane'll go our way. We cheered en masse at that 30-week ultrasound that showed her with her thumb in her mouth... I think there were a few teary eyes. On the practical side of things, if she sucks a finger or thumb and finds comfort in a baba, it means a whole lot less jiggle-dancing our child to sleep every night, because a kid with a self-soothing comforting tactic is a kid who needs a whole lot less bouncing around the house at bedtime. But let's face it, we want her on our team because we're cool, plain and simple.

Turner caught me trying to encourage Sloane to suck her thumb a few weeks ago, me assisting in the actual plugging-in of her thumb, I will admit: "... Ash, uh... you're not going to be a failure as a mom IF SHE DOESN'T END UP SUCKING HER THUMB, you know!" (Since then I've been careful-er about letting Turner catch me forcibly stuffing our child's digits in her mouth. Don't tell.)

Now. Here's the thing: I didn't expect this. It's the most weirdestest preference, she's found. Really: our daughter ...she -- well, she's decided on her "thing". I sort of thought she'd go for a silky-type fabric, herself. Or for her thumb (of which I was a longtime sucker, too). Or perhaps some kind of an apple-don't-fall-far combo. Personally I also thought this sort of thing started a bit later on, and I was going to wait until she was at least six months old before the campaign of lining the crib in polyester satin and duct taping her thumb into her head. But it seems she's beat me to the punch of deciding her preference in this realm, and it is this: mohair.

You heard me. Mohair. Discovered only a few days ago, when she was set down for a moment on Val's long-beloved green & pastel mohair blanket:

I will EAT the mohair! Rarr rarr rarr!

I give up! I am powerless in the face of the mohair!

These photos were taken a few days after the discovery, once mohair was well-established as the preference, for the record. And bless her, Mom sent us home with her longtime friend in tow - Sloane is asleep on it now, as I type. We're going to try to transfer her over to the mohair blanket we kindly got for Christmas from Turner's aunt Mary Elizabeth, but we're only just home from the eight-hour ride home from Nakusp (the last half hour of which Sloane yelled her bloody lungs out - curled tongue and gurgly-throated screaming, so we're tiptoeing around the house now that she's finally asleep), so we'll try that out tomorrow.

But, yeah - mohair. As Val said: "She loves it! Nice, scratchy, svetty mohair! I look forward to seeing her in a few years in July, carrying around this blanket. You'll have to watch that she doesn't get heat stroke in her sleep!" Indeed.

Mohair. I'll be damned.

Categories: Sloane

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She's Fourth Generation Canadian

Grampa was my Saturday Man when I was little - every Saturday we'd toot around Thunder Bay learning all about the swings in Vicker's Park, or the horsey carousel out at Chipewa, or the ice creams at the Merla Mae. I credit the bulk of what little math skill I have to Grampa, who sang to us in the car, "Five... Ten... Fifteen-twenny... Twennyfive-thirdee... Thirdeefive-fordee..." and other addition and multiplication progressions in a specific looping singsong that stuck in your head (likely the point). He'd take us out for drives and tell us to keep our eyes peeled and watch the side of the road for wallets. I'd pull my eyelids back and perch on the dashboard (no need for seatbelts in those days) with my eyeballs drying out - Grampa: [pointing]What's that?  Ash: [looking] Nothing! Garbage! We found a few wallets in our time, and a lot of old string, paper clips, and broken plastic toys.

Grampa's parents were both Ukrainian, his father from Shedevoch, an oblast in what is now Western Ukraine, near L'viv. His mother was from a town in what is now considered Poland. They emigrated by boat in the early 1900s to Canada and settled at the Lakehead. Grampa grew up there with three brothers and two sisters, in a house on Ontario Street in Port Arthur. I long romanticised their Ukrainian heritage, identifying strongly with it in a sort of abstract, rootless sense - Grampa would talk to me in Ukrainian in bits and pieces, short phrases that were part of our family's everyday dialect, and Boje Boje Boje, calling for God in those frustrating moments. But in his adult years Grampa was a bumper sticker Uke who loved fiddle music and the iconography of the old country, not one for actually sitting us down to paint psanke or that sort of thing.

My Grampa lives with Nanny in a double-wide mobile home just down from Mom's place here on Strawberry Hill. He has Parkinson's and a few other complications now, which fracture his speech and make his efforts to talk laboured and frustrating. Typical of these last few years have been repeated occasions of Grampa trying to tell us something, but then shaking his head, throwing up his hands and shrugging - the connections between his brain and his mouth fail, and he can't get the words to form. My grandfather was a man with a phrase for every occasion, the fellow who always replied, "Oh, able to take nourishment", when people asked how he was, and who shook his fist at reckless drivers on the road, calling, "Hurry up! Hell's only half-full!" The guy who always yelled, "Righto!" as he turned on his heel in Canadian Tire, and "I'm away!" as he headed out the front door on an errand. His words were his personality and everyone knew Grampa's "Al-isms".

Now he usually gets to, "You know..." or "The thing is..." before those synapses close up and he's left looking at you, wide-eyed, pointing at the tip of his tongue, telling you, It's right there, I just can't make it come out. So it was amazing when I turned around the other day and heard Grampa muttering to Sloane in full sentences. In Ukrainian. Seems those old words haven't yet been eaten by the Parkinson's.

The other morning Grampa came up to the house and held Sloane in his arms as she slept. I made breakfast, cleaned the kitchen, and was able to throw in a few loads of laundry. I came back in at one point and sat beside them, Grampa leaning over Sloane, telling her those whispering snatches of wisdom-bits grandfathers impart to only the littlest kids. And he was calling her smarkotch, a word I'd heard over the years whenever small children were around. I figured it must be a diminutive, affectionate slang meaning "wee one" or something like that. This is where we join the scene...

Ash:          [Coming in, sitting down, listening for a minute] ...What does smarkotch mean, anyway, Grampa? I hear Nanny say it as karr-smotch, but I know that's wrong. Smarkotch means... "little kid" or "tyke" or something like that in English, right?

Grampa:    [Smiling] ...Smarkotch?

Ash:          Yeah. What does it actually translate as?

Grampa:    Heh! [Leaning in, skwinching up one eye, hissing razzamatazz-style] ...Snottynose! 

Categories: Family

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On This Day In 2003

Turner and I were broken up. But Turner boarded a flight bound for Calgary - to tarrun-tarrah across the country to arrive on my doorstep (more accurately Dad's doorstep in Douglasdale, where I was living in the basement) and win back my heart, or at least give it a good shot.

We hadn't seen each other in over a year - not since even before I'd come back to Toronto in 2002 from Edmonton, gathered up my half of everything we owned, put it all in the car, and drove across the country to start my life again (minus Turner). It was a sad time. It was a sad time for a long time for both of us, there.

But then, just as we were both getting our heads screwed on straight and starting to date other people and whatnot, Turner had an epiphany. He decided that he needed to give "us" another shot. (And if that didn't work, Plan B was an around-the-world ticket and bumming around Asia for a while.) It was a pretty brave prospect - like, duuude: I left. I got in the car and drove away. Not without a great deal of sadness and grief and struggle, but those are the facts, I was the one who did the leaving. He came home to a half-empty apartment. I can't even imagine what that does to a person. Me, I was a bit preoccupied that day with hoping that the car would make it to Barrie before dying, but I certainly didn't envy Turner's side of the equation in our breakup. Awful, awful.

But a year later, after a very long year of being apart, and after we'd both rebuilt our lives, Turner made some serious decisions. He gave his landlord notice. And he packed up his stuff. And he got on a plane to Calgary.

I knew he was coming - I knew he was arriving sometime around the beginning of May, but not exactly when. I was, for the first time in my life, psychosomatically ill. Throwing up in the bathroom at work and paralysed with anxiety, frantic and terrified. On the day Turner arrived, I was at home, sick. I'd been watching movies and eating ice cream in front of the television, shaking. Finally I decided this was ridiculous, there was nothing wrong with me, get over yourself Ashley and get back to work. I got dressed and started the car, and was pulling out of the cul-de-sac when a taxi came down the road and stopped in front of Dad's house. Turner leaned out, standing on the car frame, waving.

I made him leave his bags by the door. But a month later we were engaged. Awww. Five months later we bought a house. Six months later we adopted a dog. Eight months later we were married. Seventeen months later we left on book tour. Twenty two months later we had a baby daughter. It all started that day.

So today is special. Today is May Day, the day that this life began.

Categories: Married Life

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Sloane's Pictoral Week In Review: 6.0

It's been Single Mom Central this week, with our heroines visiting Nakusp. (Note: out here in the bundoks of rural BC the internet connection - she's the slow, dial-up sort, there eh.)

Categories: Sloane

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