Canada Moms Blog

Something Beautiful

My childrens' school is collecting money for Haiti - milk dimes, errant quarters, toonies and loonies and paper money shaken from piggy banks and caged in return for chores. It's a lovely thing that our kids are so concerned for other children so far away.

It's hard to know what is just-enough-and-not-too-much to tell my young'uns so that they'll grasp the situation and yet not be horrified into bad dreams. We've talked about how the people that were struck hardest by this disaster were the ones who really didn't have anything to begin with, how we, who have so much, can help these people that we'll never meet by sending a little money so they'll have things like fresh water. Or something to eat. Or maybe a pillow and a blanket.

My daughter's class is young and confused by how someone's house could just disappear. They've been drawing pictures to send to children in Haiti, full of rainbows and smiling faces and birds holding hands. So, she explained, they'll have something beautiful until this is all fixed. Until this all goes away.

Yes, Virginia, you can share photos of your kids online.

Swarms of carpenter ants—big, shiny, crunchy buggers—rattle around within the walls of beloved spaces and communities. Voyeurs, trawlers, trolls. Anonymous pedophiles who drive around the internet in metaphorical windowless cube vans adored with airbrushed wolves. We suspect they may be in our vicinity but don’t really know for sure until they find a crack, creepy-crawling into the cozy glow of our intimate gatherings and making us all scatter and curse.

The only way to keep your children safe is to never post pictures online! some shriek, meaning well but inspiring more paranoia than good sense. Without living off the grid—which is what you’d need to do to escape the pervasiveness of the web, not to mention all the unqualified and unknown eyeballs outside your real-life front door—is sensible sharing in the Internet age an oxymoron?

To french school or not to french school?

I am covered in an all-over body rash and it’s called Schooliosis. It’s caused by a looming September, an almost-five-year-old just outside the primary cutoff, a commute dilemma and recurring French Teacher nightmares.

Let me start at the beginning.

Je suis SUCK at le francais. Just as bad as the sucking prompted by mathematics, science and music theory. If you can calculate a good tip and converse in Paris, I envy you. I get that it broadens horizons to be, like, clever and worldly and stuff. I am simply missing whatever chunk of brain commands language acquisition (and cello-playing, and pig fetus dissection, and long division).

For that reason, sending my kids to french school has never been a priority, as it is for my french-schooled husband—as I always used to say, before the decision was imminent: it’s not enough of a priority to justify an hour-long bus ride every day.

But here we are, the summer before he qualifies for free pre-kindergarten, and I’m ALL ITCHY.

vegetarian mama, omnivorian family: torture-by-tempeh or sausage party?

I am a vegetarian. Not to save the animals, and not to save my body, although both of those pursuits are perfectly good reasons to forgo a Halifax donair. I just happen to like a peaceful plate, as well as one that doesn’t have every orifice emitting the funk of the underworld for a week.

But I’m also a Maritimer, and tasked with feeding two boys and one man who would dance naked with their arms upturned and mouths open if the sky rained sausages. Which means that I am 1) bound by provincial legislation to crush lobsters with my bare hands and suck the seawater out of their furry wee legs regardless of how I feel about meat; and 2) forever doomed to cook two separate dinners nightly.

(I know, I know. Sucking lobster legs is not veggie-kosher but lobsters are nasty f*ckers. Lobsters are glorified sea insects, bloodthirsty scrappers who unite to tear each others’ claws off every third Tuesday. Lobsters are the Klingons of the animal world. And besides—my birthright requires me to ingest as much seawater as humanly possible. It’s the law.)