Canada Moms Blog

Because Everyday is Valentine's Day

It was February 14, 1993 and the very first Valentine's Day I would share with the man who would eventually become the love of my life and the father of my children.

I was 23 years old but felt more like a lovestruck tween as I spent the day in a hazy of pink and red hearts floating around my head like some weird Care-Bear-induced acid trip.  I swear you could almost see Cupid's Arrow sticking out of my butt cheek. 

You see, I was absolutely convinced that I was in for a night of a dozen roses, the richest dark chocolate, and a fancy-schmancy dinner with the most romantic boyfriend I'd had.  Ever.

Well, that bubble o' love was quickly burst later that evening, when my ever-so-dreamy boyfriend uttered the words that almost made it our very LAST Valentine's together...

"Oh, I don't celebrate Valentine's Day."

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.

He ain't heavy...he's my brother

I’ve always been somewhat of a solitary person, which I can largely attribute to being an only child. Growing up, it was just me, my mother and Holly, our clumsy (but large-hearted) Old English Sheepdog. I had no brothers or sisters, and while I can’t say I found myself pining for a sibling, I did think that having one – a best friend by default, someone who’d be there to talk to, share with – would have been kind of cool.

That all changed when I was in grade four and my stepmother announced that she was going to have a baby. Suddenly, at age ten, I was going to be a sister. It was like one day I went to bed and the next day I woke up and had a brother.

A brother!

Telling them Poppa died

A few weeks ago, I read When Grandparents Are Sick (a fabulous post by Mary on DC Metro Moms) and bookmarked it, thinking I certainly understood. After all, my soldiering-on-but-beginning-to-fail Father-In-Law was reaching the point where...well, the point where it looked like things were going to change for him.

And then things did change. He died.

Last week was a kaleidoscope of emotions and things to do - going through grief with your spouse is hard enough, but explaining death to seven and four year olds? Not great, either. And tricky. We talked a lot about how people can be so broken that even doctors can't fix them, and how Poppa had been sick for so long that things like walking and breathing were very difficult.

Birth Rates Drop Due to Recession

When news of the recession loomed and job loss started to rear its ugly head people began to take precautionary measures by means of halting procreation. Research has shown the sharpest decline of births at the start of this most recent economic recession while home prices and gas prices were at their highest. Many young couples have apparently postponed starting a family due to economic pressures whilst others have taken far more drastic measures. {source}

"For the first time in American history, [the] birthrate has dropped to roughly replacement level - or the number of births needed to maintain a stable population." {source} (this information is based on the latest available comprehensive analysis from 2006).

There is also evidence of higher instances of abortion and vasectomies as people fear the worst and take measures to protect their livelihoods.

But to what extent would you go to ensure that you're family is recession proof?

Come back with my kids!

It’s a well-known fact that the vast majority of this fine nation’s population lives somewhere along the border between Canada and the United States, and I am no exception. I grew up very close to a small border town, one that, years later, I lived in with my husband and two children for several years.

When I was a kid, it was a pretty big deal to go ‘over the river’, slang for crossing the border. I always thought it was kind of cool, the notion that we could get in our car and drive to the United States of America in less than half an hour. I got a thrill out of going through Customs, of declaring that I was a Canadian citizen and hearing my mother state where we were going and the reason for our visit. There was something very exotic about crossing the border; things like using money that had pyramids and floating eyeballs on it and the way people pronounced avenue like aven-new struck me as pretty neat.