the joys of a head cold

One of the only fun things about having a head cold is losing my sense of taste. Suddenly, that no-sugar diet is doable and last night I was amusing myself by downing handfuls of wasabi peas....... what strange and spicy things will I eat today?

Sometimes, it's enough just to love.....

Reasons why I am awesome

Sorry, but I feel like blowing my own horn today.....

• I have two beautiful kick-ass kids that I constructed, nurture, and inspire.
• I take good pictures.
• I write good words.
• My heart is almost always in the right place and I love utterly and big.
• My hair.
• I love discovering the unknown.
• I get people excited about stuff, lots of stuff. Sometimes stuff I didn't think I had any interest in. Getting excited is fun.
• I talk to everyone, or try to anyway. I meet some pretty awesome people this way.
• I bake really well.
• I run half-marathons for charity.
• Just one month ago, a famous photographer told me he had to take my picture. And he did.
• Did I mention my hair?

Why I am happy this morning

• Some very nice kid cuddles
• Waking up to my kids giggling and wearing my bras over their pyjamas
• My daughter, closing the fridge door after helping herself to a slice of pizza, saying, "yum pizza for breakfast". Frat boy.
• The sunshine and the cool breeze on my balcony, drinking coffee and listening to the faint sounds of a Marmaduke movie that I do not have to watch
• Knowing that today both my parents are home
• My son joining me briefly on the balcony to see what I'm doing, hug me, and say, "I love you Mom".

feminist thought for the day

Women are crazy, and I am the one at the front of the parade waving the flaming baton.....

Nine

Oh Ben, you are nine, where does the time go? I have blinked and another year has zoomed by and you are bigger and still so very beautiful.
You continue to spread love and joy where ever you go, touching people and making the world kinder and sunnier. Your ability to notice and understand the feelings of others borders on telepathy and is a rare gift, rarer still considering who you are. You always have a kind encouraging word for friends, and you would share anything with your sister to make her happy, and you still walk up to my bed every morning and ask "for a cuddle please momma". Your selflessness continues to inspire me and proves to me that a gentle heart can have a much greater impact than cautious one.
Grade three was so much better than two: an enthusiastic teacher and two lovely helpers who appreciated your gifts all gave you room to be yourself and encouraged you to believe in yourself and now you are a confident and enthusiastic reader and a creative writer. You made up your own poem on a walk home one evening and everytime I look at it framed on my wall I burst with pride. You can converse about Spiderman, story plots, and The Magic Flute. In addition to being a scientist and inventor, you have recently added Lego master builder to your c.v., and I believe you are on the right track about that, the bricks dance between your fingers and become worlds that I marvel at.
In addition to your academic and creative achievements, you also managed to complete a 10k run for charity and have started karate which you are patiently teaching your sister at home.
With every accomplishment you are becoming more mature, more aware, and more able to perceive and challenge things in your life that you feel are unfair or wrong. You can stand up for yourself and are a loyal friend and these traits will protect you when you need it most.
You are everything you should be and so much more, your light and sweetness are unique in this world.
I love you more than ever,
Momma

My life in points

• My birthday celebrations were all wonderful, I have wonderful friends and family.
• Naomi graduated from kindergarten, I know it's silly, but very sweet.
• The experiment of having flowers on the balcony is so far a success.
• The kids are completely psyched about summer vacation. We went to the pool for the first time this year and much merriment was had.
• I'm in the last week before I hang my pics and I'm still deciding what's going up. I'll be spending a lot of time with the printer I think.
• Taking pictures, taking pictures, taking pictures.....the sun and warmth are melting and inspiring me.
• On the hottest day of the week, I decided to bake 7 dozen cookies. Dumb.
• My house is such a mess I've stopped inviting people over until I find a shovel and a dumpster.
• I introduced my kids to the idea of bonfires and now Ben wants to go every night.
• I'm here in this moment and I'm happy.

It's that time again....

I woke up this morning with no kids, but a lovely heart card that Benny made and hid in his room as a surprise. You never know how much those things really mean until you are a parent.

So, what have I learned during the year? I've learned that some people and things cannot be replaced, but sometimes fond memories are better than bitter regrets. I've learned that I am the kind of person who cannot just jump back up and move along without pause, and I've learned that everyone deserves good things in this life, including me.

I discovered that I am not as strong as I wanted to be, last year wasn't easy. But I learned a lot about myself and the people around me and I am making peace with the changes and letting the things that hurt me go in order to embrace the things that I love.

And what will I do this year? I will try to be a good friend, a good mom, and a good person. I will follow my heart and try to have more confidence in what I do and to seek approval only from myself. I will leave myself open to discover and find joy, even if it means finding pain too, and I will continue to find out what is meaningful to me.

Let's see what happens, what I can do..... :-)

Process

I'm trying to narrow down the photos to a shortlist, and suddenly realise that I'm bored with almost everything I've done. I want dynamic, I want life and movement and faces, and details, I want images that will draw me in. I also have a new idea every hour for a theme or a style I want to do. I think that this will require more walking about with my camera at very early hours of the morning. The fact that I look forward to this is a step in the right direction I think :-)

status

Beautiful morning sun, a soft breeze coming in my window and a light in my heart. I am slowly brushing away the last, stubborn flakes of the previous version of me, the unhappy version mired in desperation, paralyzed for reasons I acknowledge but no longer understand. I believe that we are constantly reinventing, or at least we should be, always moving forward, never accepting our last work as our best work, and never taking anything in our lives for granted.
I am bringing along the things from my past that I love, even if they are not good for me. I am doing instead of talking, hopefully. It will be a nice change.
I am also hoping that my words return soon, but they have been elsewhere, contemplating a life without me, or at least a life where we are just good friends instead of intimate and entwined. I am trying to be patient, and I have other distractions, but it's hard.
While I wait, there is coffee, and the sun reflecting on the green leaves, and a smile on my face. It's a morning that makes you feel like anything is possible.

Know your Montreal architecture: the Aldred Building

I was photographing Sunday morning. Actually, I woke up at 5:30 and figured that if I was going to be awake I may as well do something constructive. I was not disappointed. I'm a morning person. I have always enjoyed that feeling of being awake before most of my world. I love driving around just before dawn, the empty streets, the street lights getting ready to flicker off, the chill in the air, watching another surviving soul in the sleepy, surreal apocalyptic grey light walking down the street or waiting for the bus. I wonder if they are feeling what I feel. There is peace and clarity and as a breeze floats over my cheek I shiver at the thrill of the world existing only for me. And there is always parking.
 
I cannot wander down to the area and not photograph the Aldred building. My lens often seems a bit too preoccupied with the beautiful Art Deco building cross-corner from Notre-Dame. It's ziggurat, step-back design was probably due to the city bylaws prohibiting buildings over 12 stories unless step-backs were included, a bylaw also adhered to by New York City, and it is no surprise that the Empire State Building has a similar design.
Construction started three months before the stock market crash in 1929 and miraculously the construction continued and was completed in 1931.



It was Montreal's first sky scraper, with state-of-the-art elevators and a visible break from the classical architecture in abundance around the square. The architects reflected the mass of the cathedral on the lower part of the building and cleverly aligned it to both Notre-Dame and Place D'Armes streets even though they do not meet at 90 degrees. I had never noticed until someone pointed it out to me on an architectour a couple of years ago. The building was commissioned to be a symbol of wealth and properity. Times had changed by the time it was finished, but the vision of the design endures to this day as a piece of luxury and beauty from an era that so many of us wish we were a part of.

Friday

I am enough

Well put, Ze

"Let me think about the people who I care about the most, and how when they fail or disappoint me, I still love them, I still give them chances, and I see the best in them. Let me extend that generosity to myself."

Moms in the jungle - article in progress

I’m sitting in the dank kitchen in a church basement waiting for my daughter’s latest class to finish. Irish dancing. It seemed like a good idea, good for her coordination, great excercise, lively music,and none of the weight issues and structure of ballet.
My daughter started with the rest of the class of absolute beginners, none of them knew a single step in September. Now most of the girls are picking it up very well and a few are exceptional. My daughter is not one of them; she’s been at it for six months now, and she’s still stumbling over basic steps and waving her arms around like windmills which is the biggest sin an Irish dancer can commit other than dissing Michael Flatley.
I get up and take a peek into the main room. She’s been shuffled into remedial jig with four other girls so they can catch up with the rest of the class. She’s pulling at her underwear and staring at herself in the mirror instead of paying attention. Sigh.
I am caught in the stage of “before it’s too late”, the world of “if they start young it’s easy”, the window of opportunity that allows your child to become a talented, successful adult rather than an ordinary drudge. Every world-renowned dancer, singer, musician, nobel winner, and elite athlete started, it seems, before age 2 and practised every day for 50 hours. And as adults they love what they do and make the world a better place and they thank their mothers every day for the sacrifice and encouragement (nagging) they received in their childhood to keep going. Their success, they say in interviews, was largely the result of their moms guidance (pushing).
I live in the age of the Tiger Mother, and I am a Tabby Cat. I want my children to find passions, but I want them to have fun and enjoy their childhoods. And I agonize over this every second of every day.
How is a Tabby mom to compete? How can I ensure that my children excel in this world of overachievers? I look around at the rest of the moms in the kitchen: some checking their email on their phones, some chatting about learning activities, some helping their other kids with their homework or feeding them something organic. We are all living with the pressure of parenting and wanting to do the best job that we can to raise our children, knowing that if it goes badly, it is all our fault. And that every other mom in the room is doing a better job than we are.
We find activities, pay the registration fees, buy the shoes (leotard, stick, racket, trampoline, chainsaw), and then throw them in and hope something talented happens. If it doesn’t, we think, as moms, that it must be our fault, so we put in more effort.
I have encouraged and asked and drilled and praised and pleaded and scolded, but nothing I have done has made my wonderful child turn into the diligent girls dancing near the front of the class, bouncing gracefully and practising their steps over and over to get them perfect.
It didn’t make her a great ryhthmic gymnast either, laying on the mats looking up at the ceiling of the auditorium while the other girls did effortless cartwheels and twirled without falling over.
We worry about wasting the limited time available and then worry that we haven’t given our kids a long enough time in an activity to truly develop. My limit is two sememsters before we move on, watching for signs that she’s still keen about the old activity. Did she just twirl without falling over? Did she just perform a flawless reel? No, probably not.
And in the midst of all of this, our children skip around in a fairy circle oblivious to talent and judgement and I envy them and realise that I am insane. And I smile and enjoy the dance.
Let’s try karate next.

Getting up

I'm lying in bed, cozy and warm and the sheets are soft against my skin and I want to burrow in and linger and daydream. Dream about accomplishing my goals, dream about creating wondrous things, dream about loving and being loved and seeing the world and discovering.
But nothing's gonna happen if I don't get up and stop playing with my phone....

The longest view

He stood there, looking out the window
And he wondered what she was thinking
About
what she was doing
At this very moment
she was watching a squirrel run along the power lines outside her bedroom window
trying to write, but the words weren't coming
Because she was looking out the window
And wondering what he was thinking
About
what he was doing
At this very moment.

There must be recorders in hell.....

Went out to a concert tonight, chamber music at Bourgie. The theme was Romantic Baroque, so Vivaldi, Handel, Telemann, but they invited a pair of recorder players. I know that recorders are pretty integral to a lot of Baroque music, but I loathe them (and harpsichords for that matter). Apologies to all who love them, but they attack every nerve in my body and turn me into a rabid dog, the sound agitates and irritates me until I want to scream or pass out to end the agony.

The bits when they weren't playing were good, a few of the Vivaldi concertos for two violins were quite nice and the Telemann Don Quixote also very lively and warm. But then the recorders kept coming back for more, the tall guy pulling out all the stops and playing a solo that was the Baroque equivalent of Hendrix wowing the audience. It was very impressive in its difficulty and execution I know, but it was all I could do not to rush the stage with my program and papercut his lip. Later on the whole thing became quite amusing when they were both playing flesh-coloured thicker alto recorders with bulbous, creamy tips. I'd never noticed what they looked like before and the enthusiastic bouncing and swaying almost brought on a giggle fit that would have had me kicked out of the hall. If my ears had not been bleeding, I'm sure I would not have made it through.

I am tired of living on canape classical - other than the opening children's concert I haven't been to the OSM or seen my boyfriend and the OM all season. I miss the power of a full orchestra and the kind of sound that pins you to the seat and sticks its tongue right down your throat. I'm tired of being tickled by the occasional arpeggio or fondled by a concerto grosso. I want a symphony,  to be slowly seduced and teased and delighted through the opening and allegretto, heightened to a flush in the scherzo, and brought to a frenzy in the finale, breathless and gasping and spent.
I need a good symphonic you-know-what....