Canada Moms Blog

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.

How To Survive A Road Trip With Small Children

Do you remember how in my last post I was rambling on about how we planned on only partaking in "staycations" while my kids are young? Reality came knocking.

While we are still adamant that we will not be boarding an airplane (or going to Disneyland) for at least another two years, we do partake in the occasional road trip. My husband's family (and a lot of mine) live in the suburbs of Vancouver. We're in the Okanagan, which is a mere three to four hour drive, depending on how close we want to get to the belly of the beast (Downtown).

We usually head down at Christmas, as well as a few other times during the year. We stop in Merritt (aka the armpit of BC) to stretch our legs, make a pee stop and get some snacks, and then finish the rest of our drive.

Last week there was a bit of an anomaly in our lives. My StepMom came to visit and then took all three of our kids back to the Sunshine Coast with her. This has never happened to us before. My husband and I were left floundering, feeling all out of sorts in a big house with no kids. We made the best of it, however. Dinner out every night! We'd have hung out sans clothing but my brother lives with us, so...

The Real Reason For A Staycation

The term "Staycation" is something you hear on the Internet/In magazine articles/on the TV. What with the economy and the lack of extra funds for many people, everyone is encouraged to stick close to home and go on a Staycation. This means that you forgo a trip to a distant destination in favor of taking in local events.

I get this. It is a good idea, no doubt.

For us, the Staycation stems more from an emotional inability that from a financial inability.

The thought of dragging three kids six and under to some distant destination with no sense of routine and THE POSSIBILITY OF NO GOLDFISH and possibly NO PEANUT BUTTER AND HONEY SANDWICHES sounds like crazy talk to me. My kids are young, yes, but they also like routine. Part of it is inherent and part of it is inflicted upon them (by me). Regardless of the source, my kids do not fare well when out of their natural element.

Canada Moms Hit The Road

Yeah. And it's gonna sound something like this:

(Yes, I KNOW. It's not the pur laine Canadian Tom Cochrane original. But: a) Emilia, being more devoted to the Nation Of Preschoolers than to her Canadian citizenship, prefers the Cars soundtrack version, and b) Tom Cochrane and EMI Music Canada aren't really all that sharesies with embedded video.)

(Check out the details at the Moms Road Trip website. We start in Halifax tomorrow and head east - maybe we'll be coming to a Motel 6 near you!)

Note to Self: Let them go

I watched the "Desperate Housewives" finale last Sunday.  Don't worry, I'm not going to spoil anything major for you if it's still sitting in your Tivo or something.  However, at one point Lynette was arguing with one of her sons (I believe it was Porter) because he wanted to take time off before university so he could travel through Europe.  Meanwhile, Lynette was threatening to cut his funds off if he didn't go to school.  He said he wanted to find himself.  She said he could damn well find himself at university.

On the commercial break I turned to my husband (and out of respect for him I must inform you that he was only watching it because I had a vice grip on the remote and he was just sitting there out of a lack of other options) and said something that I'd like to repeat here because the more people who hear it, the more accountability I make for myself.

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.

Is it Still A Vacation if You Don't Go Anywhere?

On May 26th, my husband and I will have been married 8 years; the past three with kids.  These years have been pleasant, with most of the usual ups and downs of a relationship.  It's possible we experienced the 7-year-itch but who is to say; we have both been semi-conscious for the past 12 months, ever since our second son was born.

The past year has been stressful.  To say the least.  I knew that going from one to two kids would be harder in some ways and easier in others, but I didn't expect the hard ways to be so physically exhausting.  The logistics of getting out of the house in the morning, for example, have near-paralyzed me on more than one occasion.  I did not expect to be paralyzed by the prospect of a trip to the grocery store.  I am a grown woman, one who takes a lot of vitamins! 

Existential Motherhood?

Much to my mother's dismay, I left the house this afternoon without my blackberry. For two hours, I was going to be completely unreachable. I'd just spent the morning answering important business calls and emails while out with the kids and thought it time I gave them the undivided attention they deserve.

When I left the house sans blackberry, I was reminded of that thrilling sensation I used to have when climbing the library steps at the University of Western Ontario -- in the days when hardly anyone owned a cell phone (much less a blackberry). Fitness enthusiast that I was at the time, I refused to use the elevator to get to the 4th floor. No matter how many books I had in my humongous backpack, I always took the stairs. The library stairway was very remote. Pretty much completely concrete. I could always hear the echo of my footsteps as I walked up or down those stairs. And I'd always think to myself, thrilled, that "nobody on this entire Earth knows where I am right now or what I'm doing." It was a completely existential moment that I'd have every time I climbed those stairs. "Nobody on Earth knows where I am right now." Woohoo!

The Only Reason I Would Consider A TV In My Car

In the summer of 1999, my husband and I, at that time just friends, took off for a two-month jaunt around North America in a Dodge camper van with carpet and captain's chairs.  We camped and drove and camped and drove and ate Taco Bell bean burritos (only $0.79 USD!) and drank wine from boxes and sweated a LOT - the van had no air conditioning and it was a hot summer in the American South, go figure - and when we came home we were 20 pounds lighter, our hair unruly and bleached from the sun, our skin brown from dust and campfire smoke.  There is a photo of us that we asked a passer-by to take just after we returned to Vancouver.  We are posing with the van in a back alley, filthy and free and slightly glaze-eyed at being back in the city.   

Two great loves were born that summer.  Ours for each other and mine for traveling great, purposeless distances by car.

The van is long gone and I have since completed a few road trips just as compelling in a Toyota Tercel to Winnipeg but my longing to spend another summer cavorting with no sense of purpose other than discovery and adventure has not faded.  Even as I am currently mother to a 1 and 3 year old, in a suburban townhouse, with no hope of parole, er, vacation, for a few years yet, I have been considering the possibility of packing up, driving away, aiming vaguely for the East coast.  Could we do it with kids?  And would we want to?