Canada Moms Blog

Unprepared

My five-year old - my bouncy, smiling, intense, smart five year old girl is troubling me.

She's had a bout with odd stomach pain lately - never a fever, never any problems with either end, happy to eat, happy to run about, nothing odd. Just these ever-present stomachaches and a quiet "Mama, my tummy hurts.'

I called the doctor's office after four days of her staying home from school and asked if there was any sort of virus going around. Assured there was, and that keeping her home wasn't going to be any different than sending her to school, I didn't feel bad sending her back, fortified with a few Tylenol and the knowledge that I would be home if she suddenly worsened.

The tummy trouble lingered. One week, two, three....never worsening, never getting any better. I was still convinced that this was nothing, that it would just go away....

But I thought I might talk to her doctor, just in case. I ran into him at the hospital and just casually asked about Rosey's tum.  He asked a few questions, (Where is the pain? Right in front of her bellybutton. Does it get worse? Sometimes, but not enough that I think we need to come in to see you. Is it constant? It seems so.) then stunned me by quietly saying ' It could be anxiety.'

Anxiety? In a five-year-old?

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.

Operation Hestia - Haiti bound

Last April, Canada's first female commanding officer took the helm of the HMCS Halifax. Josee Kurtz has had several months to get comfortable on the big ship, and now she's steaming full-speed ahead again....this time, to Haiti.

The HMCS Halifax and her sister ship, the Athabaskan, set sail for the wrecked shores of Haiti on the 14th of January, and are expected to make port sometime on the 20th.  They will be the second wave of Canadian humanitarian relief, and are loaded with tonnes of supplies and necessities.

 A Canadian Disaster Assistance Relief Team (DART) was sent as an advance team of 20 personnel in a CF-130 Hercules aircraft - comprised of medically trained professionals and experts in assessing needs for relief, communications equipment and personnel, infrastructure engineers and search-and-rescue equipment. It was the data reported from this team that outlined where the frigates will need to be stationed to accomplish the most.

The Canadian Forces have also announced that a  C-17 military transport aircraft carrying a Griffon helicopter and other equipment and personnel will be deployed. That aircraft can also be used for evacuation. 

The crew has been attending trainings since they left port, and have learned how to use rescue and engineering equipment like the Jaws Of Life, blow torches, and chain saws. Sailors who already have had specialized training, like Fire Fighters, Hull Technicians, or Bosuns, are training cooks, radar operators, and electricians so they can all become 'First Responders'. No one will just have one job during this operation - everyone will be doing whatever they can do.

I get hives, thinking about those lights

Last weekend I cleaned up the rest of the Halloween things, chucking the cotton spiderwebs and folding the home-made ghosts and spooky things, the haunted house sign and the foam pumpkins carefully into a box.

When I was finished it went neatly into the pantry on one of the storage shelves. I was pleased. It fits nicely there.

Unlike the clump of boxes squatting evilly on the floor nearby, spilling green and red things at the slightest provocation.

It's the dreaded Christmas crap.

Riding in Cars

I've been thinking a lot about cars lately.

Now, as anyone who knows me can tell you, I'm blessed with one of those minds that can't tell cars apart (It was....white? With a....butt?) so to have me recognize a car on the road is no mean feat. 

(This is also part of the reason all the neighbors think I'm super-friendly. I wave at all the cars that pass.)

I'm not really going to go into how I can be counted upon to get into the wrong car at the grocery - who knew there were so many small red cars? Not me, obviously....

Or how I once followed who I thought was my husband home from the grocery only to have this very puzzled man pull to the stop at the head of his driveway.....My husband was following me. It all got sorted out. Whew.

Maybe it would be more correct to say I've been remembering cars that I've ridden in.

My grandmother took me on a trip across the country when I was fourteen. I still remember the smell of the leather interior and her Giorgio and how the flatlands of Kansas seemed to go on forever.  I curled up on the floor of the front, a sheet or something over myself to try and be in the shade, and dreamt of riding bareback through fields of grain. I woke running with sweat. When we stopped, we drank ginger-ale and I ate kiwi for the first time. I was just starting to come out of my shell then, discovering that maybe I didn't have to be shy all the time and I liked different things than everyone else.

making the bread

I have always baked bread in times of sorrow. Or joy. There's something about my chemical makeup that feels contented and useful and providing when I get my hands in the dough, mixing and pounding and kneading, making a minor miracle out of ordinary household ingredients.

You can get a lot of stress out, baking bread.

I can't remember my mother baking, nor my grandmothers, but there must have been someone - it's usually generational, isn't it? And while my daughter is eager to climb up on the chair, lean over the counter, and smack the daylights out of the dough, she's a bit young yet to share confidences with, or to work out possible solutions while wrist-deep in flour-dust and yeast granules. To ponder and think and make strategies that perhaps don't solve the world's problems, but bring me closer to center.

Pink for Peace

I wrote about this last year here

The second Thursday of the school year in Nova Scotia is known provincially as Stand Up Against Bullying Day. This began in 2007, when a freshman in an Annapolis Valley High School was bullied by  seniors for wearing a pink shirt on the first day of school. Two other seniors took note and decided enough was enough. Pooling their money, they bought fifty cheap pink shirts at a discount store and emailed everyone in the school they could think of, asking them to wear one of the shirts the next day. They figured that they could get twenty to thirty people to wear the shirts, but that twenty was enough to show that they were taking a stand.

The next day, they handed out the shirts - and were astonished to see over 400 other pink shirts worn at their school. There were pink accessories, pink jackets, pink sneakers - even a few pink basketballs on the gym floor that day, all worn to stop bullying.

Home is where the heart is (so why can't I stay?)

That's what they always say, right?  That home is where the heart is.  I think that's my big problem right now (and if that's my biggest problem, then life is good, I know that).  I live in Montreal.  Right now, though, I'm on a three-week vacation in Halifax.  Granted I work as a freelance writer so I'm not truly on vacation because I have to keep working anyway but it's been working out well by getting some done first thing in the morning and finishing up the rest before supper if I don't finish it all.

And here's the truth - while my literal, physical home is back in Montreal - an apartment full of furniture, toys, clothes, everything - my heart is here.  So where is my home really?

Well over a decade ago I thought that I would really like to live in Halifax.  I blame it on the movie Message In A Bottle.  I took one look at that coast and thought, "yes.  I need the ocean."  Of course the movie took place in Maine, but that would be more complicated, so I just shifted the co-ordinates north a bit and figured that Halifax would be ideal.

Fast forward a couple of years and I meet my husband - who has some family out here and grew up spending most of his summers here.  Our first vacation ten years ago was to Halifax and that sort of sealed the deal for me.  Seeing firsthand how friendly the Maritmes are made me want to be here more than ever.

Seven years ago we returned for a wedding.  The morning after our arrival, he asked me if I would ever consider moving to Halifax.  I didn't even need half a second to think about it.  I answered yes immediately.

An American Girl in Canada

I got pregnant four months after I moved to Canada.

Somehow, through all the rigamarole of applying for permanent residency and applying for a work permit and tearful phone calls from relatives who were convinced I'd lost my mind and gone to the North Pole (Students in the United States are NOT taught as much geography as Canadian children are - the entirety of Canada is left as 'our friendly neighbor to the north' ) and trying to fit into an area with a much smaller-town feel, the stars aligned and the heavens sang (or, come to think of it, could have been all that newlywed sex) and I started feeling....off.

I held off going to the doctor until I was convinced I was dying. We were fumbling with bills and finding our way as a new couple - why would I put the added stress of co-pays and office fees onto our plate? Surely this would go away. Conditioned from years of having to drop thirty dollars every time I even set foot into a doctor's office, I was panicked by the idea of having a chronic illness far from home. The tests that would have to be run would bury us. And what would happen if whatever-this-was was classified as an existing condition?  I knew my husband loved me - but what if this was something ....big?

And how in hell were we going to pay for this? It was enough to make an American girl heave.

When I finally confessed that I was scared out of my mind that I was going to bankrupt us and force us to live in the streets, Jamie was less than comforting. He was completely uncomprehending.

Cheesed

Like most people who read blogs, I have a sizable blogroll. Certain themes have trended in through time - I had a lot of baby blogs when my daughter was a little, and when I went to work at the local hospital, blogs written by doctors, nurses and paramedics stacked up in number.

There are always blogs to follow about almost any profession, hobby, craft, whim. Even things you never thought you'd be interested in. But we're eating at home a LOT more these days, and in between the 100 mile diet and trying to show my children that with a little ingenuity, we can do almost anything, I've found myself reading all sorts of new and incredible stuff - and then trying it out.

For example, I adore cheese. Even the stinky stuff most people won't touch. Did you know you can make a lot of cheeses in your kitchen? Seriously. Like ricotta. Known around here as the glurp-glunch-YUMMY lasagna cheese. Or paneer, an incredibly basic but delicious Indian cheese that squeaks between your teeth if fried lightly in ghee. Even semi-hard and hard cheeses can be made at home.