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i am all ascatter.

my work is mostly done…my formal work, my paid work.  the paid part, at least, is totally done.  there are still a few finishing touches i’ve committed to finishing up as freebies, just ’cause i get this nifty sense of validation from being involved in things that exist outside the four walls of my house.  but these bits, these leftovers, languish now.  there is no drive, no rush.   after almost fifteen weeks on bedrest, i have actually unyoked myself from schedule, from the fetters of duty, from the little voice in my head that berates me with its ancestral refrains of Protestant Work Ethic virtues until i am compelled to accomplish, to complete, to drone away my days in busyness.  i have sent the voice away on a whisky binge.  i hope it is enjoying itself.

but i’m kinda lost without it.

i loll my way through my days, browsing the Baby Center naming boards, assembling photo albums, considering the abject state of my dish pile.  having to lay around in the sunshine reading books and whiling away the hours hydrating myself with lemonade?  um, yeh, it’s torture.  ahem.  or really, not at all.  but that same little voice that ought to be soused by now on its whisky vacation still seems to have left an echo behind it, a hollow sound that eats at my pleasure in all this unaccustomed time just to Be.

i am more than capable of filling the time.  but the fact that i spend half of it worrying that i’m not making the most of it and the other half trying to appear more productive than i really am suggests to me that i have a problem.

this morning i literally tripped over the root of the problem.  it skittered away from me across the hardwood, and i sank into the couch and stared at it, revelation dawning.  it was clear as a bell, and a beautiful blue.  it told me, friends, that my life is not actually my own, to enjoy or squander as i wish.  i have a colonized mind.  my life, o lo my brothers and sisters, is a Thomas the Tank Engine episode, and the narrator is eager to get my lazy ass redeemed, already.  my name is Bonnie and i am addicted to being a Really Useful Engine.

if you are not parent to a two-year-old boy, you may not be familiar with the smugly innocuous yet sanctimonious little morality plays that make up the backdrop to our waking moments here at chez crib - but if Oscar is awake and not eating, he can usually be found either carrying around a small blue train, begging to watch the same small blue train on YouTube or video, or demanding that someone read to him from his Big Thomas Book (a collection of righteous stories written - surprise! - by a post-war Protestant Reverend) or his Baby Thomas Book (a catalogue of Thomas products which Oscar’s parents could spend thousands of dollars to buy for him if only his mother were not so cheap and ironically Protestant in her attitudes towards material expenditures…and if she needed more things on the floor to trip over).

in nearly every Thomas episode, wayward Thomas gets distracted by mere petty enjoyment or vanity, and must be redeemed, brought back into the fold of industriousness by some mishap, train crash, or other teachable moment.  the Sodor branch line which Thomas runs has a disturbing number of crashes and mishaps, to be frank - i would not suggest anyone book their next vacation with them.

but i have the sinking feeling i’ve done just that.

i am not sure when this conversion to the Church of Usefulness happened to me.  i spent decades sleeping in, taking jobs in odd corners of the world because they offered a twenty-hour work week, drinking myself cheerful in seedy little bars and puzzling over obscure philosophy for fun, not credit.  i still paid all my bills and was sober for all my classes, admittedly, but i was free from the internal compulsion to validate myself by busywork, by accomplishment, by checking things off the to-do list.

is this part of motherhood, or am i just a loony shut-in?

first meeting of Really Useful Engines Anonymous at, um, my house.  soon.  send help, wisdom, or at least some toothsome sweets.

no angst today.  we’re all out.  i made 24 weeks today, safely past yesterday’s milestone of having had my water break at 23w6d the first time around, necessitating airlift and uncovering all sorts of previously unanticipated complications…

so today i’m just breathing, grateful, good.

and in celebration, i’m doing laundry.  because i really AM that much of a party animal, yep. and because it’s a sunny, windy day, and Dave put up a clothesline a few weeks ago, and the ten foot walk to the back deck from the washing machine is a fine form of exercise for those who have no musculature left.  and because this bedrest thing has meant there’s been a slight, erm, build-up of laundry in our home of late and now that i’m allowed to do a little, i feel it’s incumbent upon me to save the hamper from utterly self-destructing under its own weight.

but also because i want to do a little public service announcement.  i think there’s probably little so misunderstood in the entire parent-sphere (blog or real-life) as cloth diapers. and having just laundered some, i’d like to counter some of the rumours.

i keep hearing about how they’re hard, how they create a lot of work.  i can see the reasons behind those assumptions - my own mother, who owned a total  of twelve cloth prefolds during my entire pre-potty-trained existence and used ‘em, day in and day out, with a wringer washer, believes Pampers are some kind of miracle of Jesus.  i get that.  i’m not above disposables - we use them sometimes when we’re travelling, and they have their place in my canon of Reasons i’m Happy it’s Not 1970.  but what i want to lay out here, just in case there’s anybody out there waffling on the fence about diapering options…cloth is actually no big deal.  not a lot of work, not a lot of gross, not a lot of waste water.  seriously.  it does seem to end up sounding like a lot of work nearly every single time i hear about it in media or on discussion boards or at baby showers, unless the person speaking is some kind of earth mother goddess type…but i call bullshit babyshit on that.  it’s a myth that keeps us comfortable, societally, keeps us consuming, keeps us thinking we’ve got it good.  but it’s a myth that makes a mountain out of the molehill of work actually involved in cloth diapering, and a myth that ends up perpetuating a fair amount of, um…waste.

this week, as public radio helped me while away the tedium of collating the final report for the project i’ve worked on all year, there was a show on about some Canadian dude who’s gone to England to recycle that nation’s disposable diapers, because a) Canadians aren’t nearly so interested in the whole recycling thing and b) England only has nine years max of landfill available for nappies before, well, babies are just going to have to stop pooping or people are going to have to change their practices.  sometimes i suspect all this space we have around us here in North America doesn’t exactly channel our better angels.  in any case, the companion piece to Mr. Diaper Recycler was a panel of three moms from across this country discussing the diapering choices they’d made.  and while all were making efforts to be greenish in various aspects of their lives, the discourse around diapers was pretty familiar.  the mom using cloth was a serious eco-hippie, kudos to her, who’s also used elimination communication with her kids and had them totally trained and probably growing patchouli and playing guitar by the age of two.  the mom who used disposables had intended otherwise during pregnancy but got overwhelmed by a colicky baby and now “just doesn’t think about it and doesn’t feel guilty about it.”  and the mom using compostable g-diapers mentioned the waste of water resources that go into cloth in any case.

of all of them, the one i identified most with personally was b…the overwhelmed one.  i’m not the natural mama sort, not by nature.  when it became clear that i had a child intent on crying and not sleeping for the first three and a half months of his little life, i struggled.  i was not a pretty sight.  and we’d been sent home from the NICU with a crapload of preemie and newborn Pampers, so i used ‘em and into the landfill they went, and i felt a wee bit nasty about that but seriously, when you’re not sleeping, eco-footprints can go screw themselves, especially if you don’t see an equally simple option at hand.  when the Pampers ran out, O was about two months old and coming on ten pounds and starting to look like he might not swim in the prefolds and wraps i’d bought…so i tried them.  and they leaked, and it was a bit of a disaster and i very gravely contemplated throwing the whole venture into the landfill just out of spite.

it was mostly the fact that i had a friend who’d used cloth successfully that kept me going.  this wasn’t just some crazy thing that nobody i knew actually did.   i had someone to ask, to learn from.  and so just in case any of you might need that person in order to give cloth a try, assuming you even you want to, here’s me uh…being that person?  or volunteering to try, at least.

there are a few things i needed in order to be able to use cloth as much as i have and as long.  most important was a washer (and preferably a dryer too, though i try to line/drip dry a few loads a week to save energy).  had that washer not been conveniently located between my kitchen and my back deck, it would have been a more daunting workload, for sure.  the second most important, particularly once i went back to work, was a sitter willing to try cloth.  i’ve been lucky on both counts.  but mostly what i needed was just to work out a system that i could keep simple.

here’s what we use:

1) we used prefolds and wraps for the first six months or so because i’d been given a bunch of prefolds and i’m cheapish.  i never did find great wraps but all of them starting working better and leaking less once i started washing with Arm & Hammer green, because we have hard water here and “free”-type detergents just add to the build-up on diapers.

2) around six months, i retired the prefolds and ordered pocket diapers: eight Fuzzibunz mediums and six Happy Heinies from an online Canadian company.  pocket diapers are brightly coloured covers which you stuff an insert into - we got some terry “Thirsties” inserts and some hemp.  Thirsties have been better inserts for us (O is a heavy wetter), though a double-stuff with one of each work great at night.  all of them work best if they go in the dryer at least every second or third wash.  Oscar is still wearing the Fuzzibunz mediums - when he turned a year i ordered twelve size larges as well, as he was beginning to outgrow the the Happy Heinies.  all but one of our stash of twenty Fuzzibunz have held up beautifully, despite hard and constant use.  they’re a little bulky, kind of like having two disposables on at once, but are cut slim between the legs unlike some cloth options i’ve seen, so they’ve never impacted his walking or comfort, just give him a cute little bubble butt that is occasionally hard to get those pesky toddler skinny-jeans over.

3) Kushies makes biodegradable liners, which i put in most of Oscar’s diapers (especially if a poop is due).  when i change him, the liner and its contents just flush away.  if there’s anything runny that’s gone beyond the liner’s borders, i swish the whole diaper in the toilet while flushing.  two flushes max per poopy diaper, if that.  my hands seldomly get poop on them, but if they do it’s no more than they would in an infant blow-out.  i wash them after, or use Purell.

4) i have a green $5 plastic bucket with a snap-on lid in my bathroom.   wet and dirty diapers go in there.  i do not soak them.  i just rinse the bucket every second wash or so with water and a bit of baby shampoo, in the tub.  if i remember.

5)  we also have a purple “wet bag” (also ordered online, about $12) which goes to the sitter with Oscar everyday, along with 4 or 5 pre-stuffed diapers.  the stuffing and packing in his daycare bag takes max 4 minutes - his sitter sends home the wet bag (which is fabulous and holds all smell in despite having been washed nearly daily for the past 14 months) in his daycare bag, and it gets opened and the contents dumped directly in the washer or in the diaper bucket, if we’re not washing that night.

the system that works for us, basically, is that most nights all the day’s diapers (4-6, depending) and O’s pajamas from the night before and any underwear or socks or tshirts lying around the house, plus any sheets or towels or baby facecloths that need washing, all get dumped in the washer with the wet bag.  all together.  i do one single large load of wash on hot, with a cold rinse, a small amount of detergent, and (at least once a week) a shot of vinegar.  when Oscar was smaller his clothes got washed in there too, as they were frequently rather bodily-fluid-stained themselves.  mine too.  clothes and diapers come out clean and sweet-smelling.  they go in the dryer or get hung to dry.  the wet bag hangs out for the night and goes back in the daycare bag in the morning.  we do this wash four or five times a week, and end up with clean socks and underwear and whatever else in the process.   particularly when Oscar was smaller and making a mess of clothes all the time, it was literally no more wash than i would otherwise have been doing anyway.  and there’s never a stink build-up, because we don’t leave them lying around for more than 36 hours or so.

i dunno.  it’s taken me four times longer to write it all down than it would to do it.  and maybe it’s not very convincing…or maybe it’s just not for you in any case, and that’s your business.  but just, please…don’t believe it the next time you hear cloth diapers are so hard, or that they’re just as bad as disposables because of the water usage (unless, perhaps, you live in drought-stricken Australia and never actually do laundry).  the truth is, our society just hasn’t done a very good job of supporting people in learning to use them.  even with me on bedrest, they’ve added up to perhaps a half-hour of work per week for Dave & i over the last few months.  we don’t spend money on diapers (or haven’t since i got the last twelve on Ebay for $160 thirteen months ago).  we never run out.  we’re not even doing a lot of wash that we wouldn’t otherwise be doing.

just sayin’.  there’s a learning curve, for sure.  but if anybody wants some assvice or some support trying to get there, you are welcome to pick my brain until the cows come home.  because i do think that financially and ecologically they’re a worthwhile option, and one i’d love to see more families trying rather than being intimidated out of it before they ever even get started.

we leave early tomorrow morning for Halifax, for the next installment in the Miss Cervix Universe 2008 pageant, the continuing saga.

this time we’re aiming for a daytrip…a zoom there, zoom back operation, wherein Oscar will remain with his sitter for the day and be picked up by Nannie for supper if we’re not back yet.  simple.  concise.  no worries of vomit in the backseat, no eight hours strapped in a carseat for the little monkey, no naps to time with the ultrasound appointment.  all good, we think.  easier on everyone.

and we should be home by bedtime at the latest, to tuck him in.

but i have this packed suitcase that i’m bringing with me just in case.  just in case they keep me, hospital bedrest, because we are rounding on the dates where that becomes a possibility and it has happened twice before and both times, somehow, it was still a shock.  my mind reels to think that suddenly, like fingers snapping, i might not be here for months, in this house.  i might not be here to see that the laundry currently in the dryer gets folded, ever, that the paper towel gets replaced, that my plants don’t wither and keel over dead.  i might not be here to sing O to sleep at night, to snuggle him close in the mornings, to stuff his daycare bag and put away the winter clothes when summer finally comes and make sure we have that oatbran cereal because he looooves it.  nothing life or death, these things i’d miss, these things i do.  and it’s only just in case, i have this suitcase…it’s only just in case.

still, i think he knows.  or suspects.

i’ve never really been an outdoorsy sort.

my childhood memories of the delights of nature mostly involve being cold, or damp, or slightly unsure of what to do with myself.  i had an aversion to bugs, and other than my grandmother’s ancient raspberry bushes - which yielded more bugs than berries in any case - little connection to the concept of the fruits of the soil.

but this spring, i want to go outside like never before.  most of this is sheer and simple contrariness: the weather is terrible and i’m confined to my postage stamp of a backyard at best, therefore i wish to conquer the wilds.  or at least the local park.  i want to walk.  i want to plant things.  i want to just…go.  somewhere.  anywhere.  we ended up at the ER yesterday with Oscar for the second time in two weeks - oh yes, we make fine use of our universal health care here at chez crib - and it was…exciting.  which is pitiful.   i just want to touch something other than a computer keyboard, see sights that aren’t yet another doctor’s office.  i am beginning to dream, in my fitful sleep, about those rare occasions in my past where i’ve hiked mountains and rambled in meadows and camped in sand dunes…i considered most of those experiences vaguely unpleasant at the time (ask me about trailing the short-eared f&*#$ing owl all over a frozen wasteland of dykes on the last day of the old millenium and how i thereafter resolved, over a good stiff hot drink, to never go outside during this century) but suddenly, uninvited, the pastoral forays replay in my dreams like siren songs, all tarted up and sexy.

i know i’m being petulant.  i knew what i was getting into.  i would have given my teeth to be in this position, safely this far along, a few months back.  i still would, would be thoroughly jealous of myself, if i believed it at all, if etched on my brain in my own handwriting were not that journal entry from early April 2005 that reads, “we are having a daughter, a daughter! and Dr. X says everything is fine and we are so close now to all that i can remember wanting.”  all of it smoke within weeks, ruins, the cruellest of jokes.  so i roll through this endless cycle of days feeling confined and detached and overwhelmed by all the minutiae slipping by me, waiting for the axe to fall on this foolish dream and wondering if i shouldn’t just pack it in now and start running already, running far far away from the reckoning that must have my name on it, running to meadows or mountains or whatever in nature has the capacity to contain me and all this wild, terrible fear, this unshakable sense of being sacrifice for the impending slaughter.

….they are not departed or gone
they were waiting for me
when i said that i just can’t go on
and they brought me their comfort
and later they brought me this song…

- Leonard Cohen

yesterday afternoon, after my (lollipopless) doctor’s appointment and Oscar’s (also lollipopless, how cold is that?) trip to the audiologist where we discovered that my boy’s wee eardrums aren’t vibrating at all and are probably the reason for his delayed speech and struggles with pronunciation…and that there’s a three month waiting list for treatment…my mother and son and i clattered into my front porch.  i was thinking grumble grumble, moo moo despite the unprecedented if not terribly exciting two trips out in one day when i all but trod on a large package sitting on my door mat.  with my name on it.  postmarked “Australia.”

whee.

i ushered Oscar and Nannie in, and got O divested of boots and Nannie set up for the hour of Thomas the Tank Engine delights she was about to most graciously endure so as to allow me to do some much-needed lying down, and then i opened the mystery package.  it held a big, simple, elegant photo/scrapbook album…with photos inside.  of me.  and Oscar.  and Dave.  recent photos, entertainly captioned, against cheery backgrounds…and one, combed from the archives of the blog, of Oscar’s eleven-month old fat fingers gently touching his brother’s urn.  towards the back, more pages and scrapbooking materials waiting to be used.  inside the front cover of the album, it read To Bon, Dave, Oscar & Finn…love George, Will, Euey, & Aoife.  26/04/08.

i blinked back tears and then realized i was losing that battle and hell, i was just so damn touched and surprised and there’s been a lot of that kind of marvellous, random kindness lately and i gave up entirely and just lay there and wholeheartedly sobbed.

because this old friend of ours, half a world away, whom we haven’t laid eyes on in the three+ years since we left Korea, spent hours putting this together for me.  and sent it airmail, at no small expense, to get me started on something to do while on bedrest.  something for my children, something to pass on.  and she did this the week she herself was home recovering from a D&C after the miscarriage of their much-wanted third baby.

i felt very humbled.  and very grateful, and blessed in the people i’ve been lucky enough to connect with in my life.

just as i felt when a few weeks ago or so the delivery dude showed up at my door with an Amazon package, again with my name on it, and i thought strange, i haven’t ordered anything from Amazon but heck, maybe it’s a happy mistake, and i opened the box to find two fabulous, stimulating, challenging books inside courtesy of Jen, who just kinda thought i might need something to read these days.

just as i felt a day or two later when another box showed up from London, from an old, old friend who’d read my post about losing the bracelet Dave gave me, and had sent me another, one that reminds her of the beach she & Dave & i used to hang about on, lifetimes ago…and had stuffed the box with Marks & Spencer candies and a pair of Wonder Woman underoos, i shit you not, in grown-up size!  i coveted Wonder Woman underoos all through my childhood, dudes.  i am now living the dream.

back a few weeks before that, when i lamented about trying to stuff Oscar’s cute little round bumtail into skinny jeans, Mad mentioned there was a sale on elastic-waist pants at a store in Sleepytown, and what size did i want?  and she just…sent them.  just like she sent cookies before Christmas, homemade gingerbread, after my miscarriage when i was slow and swamped with sorrowing.

i’ve gotten a lot of emails lately, from friends far away just catching me up with their lives, readers delurking to say nice things, longlost friends popping up out of the woodwork.

jeebus, people.  you make an old couch troll feel…nice.  and loved.  and kind of embarrassed.

because i don’t really do stuff like that so well.  i don’t make stuff for people, or buy things and put them in the mail.  i don’t send so many of those personal emails (or responses) as i’d like to.  it’s a near-lost art, in my world…one sacrificed to delusions of my own busy-ness, i think.  my own self-importance.  and i am ashamed, suddenly, of all the times i’ve thought “oh, i’d like to do x for so and so!” and then promptly forgotten, because x doesn’t fall in the top five list of priorities that anal moi is trying to organize and accomplish and keep moving at all times, even from my couch…because that’s how i live my life, insular except for these words here.

to Georgia, and Jen, and E, and Mad…and all of you with your generosity of words and humour and support…all of you who’ve befriended me and been good to me even though i’ve never sent you squat…thank you.  a big wet thank you, from the bottom of my little grinch heart.  because you’re helping, very much.  helping me stay mostly buoyant, helping me feel less alone, helping me remember how grateful i am to be on this couch in the first place, carrying this child i’ve wanted so badly.

…and in case anyone is inspired to send more bedrest delights, Dave asks me to mention how much i like beer.  hmm.  sometimes he’s not to be trusted, that one.

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this rush of positivity isn’t just the result of largesse and kindness…i also have more to look forward to in the next 72 hours than i’m accustomed to in, erm, 72 much longer measures of time.  tomorrow, we head to Halifax for my 20 week ultrasound, where we get to see the baby, which always makes me all sweet & squishy inside even if i have had, oh, two hundred odd utrasounds over the past three years.  tomorrow, we may even find out if i shall, as i suspect, become the thing i never ever imagined i’d look forward to with any kind of anticipation…mother to three boys.  yikes.  and yet…okay.  and thrilling just in the proximity to the big revelation.

also tomorrow, if the hospital lets me, i should get to dine with me Blog’Er mateys and the Upper Canadians bold enough to join us.  i’ve only ever met two bloggers before, and love them both.  tomorrow i meet seven more.  and we get to hang out all weekend.  and they’re going to get drunk and be waaaay more entertaining than those voices in my head that usually talk me through my days, so i’m psyched.

then…and i am still pinching myself on this one…on Sunday, we return home, where two old and dear and not-nearly-often-enough-seen friends will arrive at my house, and we will all head out to see Leonard Cohen.  Leonard Freaking Cohen.  who hasn’t toured in fourteen years.  who is playing in my teeny-weeny hometown, more generally reserved for such lesser events as Trooper reunions and high school plays.  i think Leonard knew i needed a little cheering up, that foxy old charmer.  i’ll be showing up in a wheelchair, but Leonard, baby…i’ll have bells on.

feeling pretty lucky, folks.  i’m betting Monday David Bowie shows up on my doorstep with cupcakes.  y’all are welcome to come watch.

we both used to live here, separately, married to other people, living other lives.

eight and ten years later, respectively, here we are again, turning a doctor’s appointment into a vacation, wheeling Oscar down streets that seem far more city-ish than they used to, teasing ourselves with notions of moving back here, spending more time on these old streets. there are more people like us here, shabby faux urbanites who get excited about Korean restaurants and Belgian beer and neighbourhood coffee shops…and in truth even after a decade gone, we have more friends still here than we do at home.

but we were going to go home today.

instead, the doctor’s appointment this afternoon turned into a four-hour extravaganza of history and questions and more questions and not only are we going with a cerclage after all but we are going with said cerclage at 9 am tomorrow morning. here. so here we stay, for a bit.

my cervix is already shorter than it was at 22 weeks with Oscar. it was my decision, ultimately, which i think i would’ve preferred it not be, but it is made.

there are risks…infection primarily, but doing it this early and while i still have some cervix left means that the risk of losing the little round-headed alien i saw on the ultrasound today is in the 1-2% range. whereas i suspect this cervix’s chances of making it even to 28 weeks without a stitch might be…um…worse. there is no certainty of this, mind you…of any of this.

but we will stay and Oscar and his father can be urbanites for a few more days whilst i revisit the perinatal bedrest floor of the IWK.

be careful what you wish for, says i.

to the multitude who weighed in with ideas and experiences and just good wishes regarding milk and asthma and all that mad stuff…thank you.  so much.  we saw our family doctor (who’s not utterly opposed to the possibility of a dairy connection, btw, it’s just not his area of expertise in any way) on Thursday, and Oscar’s lungs are clear and good to go once again.  the doc too was strongly in support of putting O back on the rice milk for now and then trying cow’s milk again in a month or two once cold season is over and before allergy season begins, just to see if we can establish a pattern.  allergy tests will follow, but probably not until fall.

the rice milk O drinks is organic and fortified with vitamin D and calcium, so i feel pretty good about giving it to him.  while his diet isn’t heavily meat-reliant, he gets a lot of protein and actually gravitates more to protein foods than carbs, so i’m not over-worried about him having any protein deficiency.  we do give him soy milk occasionally too but don’t want to overload the soy in his diet as kids with dairy sensitivities often have the same reactions to soy.

and mostly, yep, i’m still just kinda hoping he’ll grow out of it.  so having all of you tell me stories of siblings and relatives and cousins’ pet dogs with terrible childhood asthma that magically went away in adulthood…that was like candy.  i love you.  i like to imagine myself a realist and i do prefer to see the details of what’s coming down the road at me, but clearly…when it comes to my kid, i’m all over the possibility of magical salvation, of having him snatched from the jaws of even very small, controllable, more irritant-than-life-threatening kinds of dragons.  and in the meantime, he gets tasty organics.  god, i am such a yuppie.

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and in the off chance that you spend your nights dreaming of rubbing elbows with my bourgeois self, some of us from eastern parts will be gathering May 16th-18th in bizarrely-picturesque Chester NS for our own highly-tongue-in-cheek version of BlogHer, since San Francisco is thousands of dollars away for us and July just…well…inconvenient for most.  Maritime BlogHer will involve absolutely no speeches, panels, or experts, but probably copious amounts of wine, beer, and chocolate.  i have first dibs on the chocolate, just so all are clear.  we’re numbering a cozy 8-10 strong, renting a B&B for the weekend, and…um…plan to hang out.  invitations are utterly open.

however, if you do plan to come and kiss fish (hey, it’s local custom, one has to be culturally sensitive) with us, we’ll need confirmation by the end of this month.  please join our facebook group (it’s the only one entitled Maritime BlogHer, easy to find) and let us know your travel plans so we can try to coordinate rooms and drives and all that good stuff.

and i can regale you with all the exciting things i learn about dairy and asthma in the interim.

sometimes running away from home for a few days is just the very best thing in the world.  except maybe for coming home again.

Dave & i took off from his parents’ place in the forenoon on Boxing Day and drove the six hours to Quebec City.  by ourselves, just the two of us.  Oscar stayed with his doting grandparents, who, in thus providing us with fifty-three hours of uninterrupted, non-working, non-nap-scheduled time, gave us the very best post-Christmas present ever.  we spent two nights and one whole wondrous day wandering around historical, atmospheric Vieux Quebec, which we’ve both been to but not for a decade and never together.  we checked out museums and architecture and boxing day sales and as many restaurants and cafes as we could humanly manage, all while gentle snow fell.  we even rode the Funiculaire, the almost 130-year-old elevator rail line that scales the old city walls.  we walked more than we’ve walked in months, cumulatively.  for that matter, we got a lot more exercise in a myriad of ways than we have in months, actually.  ahem.  i do love a king-size bed.

but the very most marvellous part of the whole trip for me, other than possibly the three ridiculously bone-chilling minutes i spent in the hotel’s not-nearly-heated-enough outdoor pool with snowdrifts blowing onto my nekkid neck while i dog-paddled around its circumference gawking at the city lights, was the drive.  the road trip.  the glorious adventure of being just two fools in a car with gas, coffee, and a pile of cds.  oh, and Grandpapa’s borrowed GPS, which admittedly took some of the terror out of my attempt to actually drive into the city myself without panicking and throwing myself into the Saint Lawrence when confronted with seventeen different off-ramps at once. 

in the nearly three years since Dave and i shed our expatriate backpacks and became settled, pregnant-and-or-parenting dwellers of my smallish hometown, we’ve driven a lot.  to exactly two destinations - his parents’ house in northern New Brunswick, about four and a half hours away, and his sister’s house and/or the IWK hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a shorter trip by about an hour.  the landscape on each road has become so familiar that new potholes are noteworthy, but overall, it’s monotonous, destination-focused travel, the stuff of survival.  we load the car with sippy cups and diapers and try to time our drives for optimum napping.  one of us usually ends up performing a puppet show from the front seat for part of the trip, whilst we debate whether the Velvet Underground really counts as lullaby music.  it’s family travel.  i love it, with all its labour-intensive cheer.  but it is not - i repeat, NOT - a road trip.

Quebec was a road trip.  we had a choice of routes to take, open road in front of us allowing options, freedom to flip a coin.  neither of us had been on either highway in nearly ten years, so the low mountains and snow-capped woods were all a discovery, a fresh landscape, dotted with cheese shops and gas stations selling pain au chocolat.  we could blast the stereo as loud as we liked, whenever we liked, or lapse into long, introspective silences just watching the expanse of forest wind away from the road.  we could stop when we wanted, or not at all, and not once did i feel bad for failing to entertain Dave with a lively chorus of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”, complete with hand clapping and nose beeping.

it was good.  out on Highway 20 where the high road and the low road merge, i drove past ghosts of my younger self in different cars, spinning up and down the highway, a passenger in cars and lives that intersected with my own for a moment, or a season.  spring break 1991 i hitch a ride with friends to a ski hill even though i cannot ski, half an ounce of hash on us as we cross from Quebec into the US.  December 1992 and four girls in a beatup borrowed Volkswagen drive all night to a funeral for our roommate’s father, suddenly dead at fifty. summer 1993 and fall 1994 i take the train through these parts, running along the Saint Lawrence parallel to the highway, wild-hearted and broken here, riding the bar car to a new life in Vancouver there.  August 1997, my honeymoon, spent mostly camping or visiting in-laws, with one memorable night in a hotel so skanky the only furniture in the room other than the bed was a bench seat from a car, bolted into the concrete floor.

i saw Dave too, on his way to Neil Young concerts and the Lilith Fair and probably countless other trips i don’t know about or have forgotten the tales he once regaled me with.  i heard him, in the cds we played, the full collection of neglected oldies and burnt mixes from the Napster heyday.  i heard us laughing at 3 am, back in Korea in the early, early days of our romance, drunk on bad wine and each other, sharing tunes from our respective formative years, convinced that a mutual taste in Kris Kristofferson had to be some kinda sign.

the familiarity and yet the novelty of it, all this silly road trip freedom, made us giddy…and filled us, reaffirmed us, in a way that a hundred days at home couldn’t have.  i felt all those fragments of foundation and vagabond days as a gift, a reminder that life has not always been Elmo and organized overpacking.  i felt twenty, and twenty-five, and thirty all collapse in on me, rejuvenating this almost thirty-six.  i felt like a friend and partner, and like myself, all my selves, all carried within.  i put my feet up on the dash and revelled in the joy of selfishness, all the way there.

and most of the way home.  until we got about two hours away, at which point we two overgrown wish-we’d-been-Deadheads began to long aloud for the little boy we hadn’t seen in two days, and then the game was up.

Oscar’s smile met us at the door.  i saw nothing more beautiful in Quebec City, nor in all the years i rambled.

but his parents brought back deeper, more rested, connected smiles to him…and so the trip was a raging success.  tomorrow, we drive the rest of the way home from Grandmaman & Grandpapa’s, a family ride, fully stocked and carefully timed.   i think we will try to teach Oscar some Iggy Pop tunes along the way.

so, not tomorrow, but the next day, we launch the nifty and innovative and multi-tentacled Head of Medusa project into which i have channelled all the insanity mayhem anal retentiveness diligence of my organized yet befuddled little brain over the past three+ months.

okay, maybe not all.  but lots.

this launch - all four carefully scripted hours of it - will involve fifty-two grade seven students, four teachers, a celebrity-edublogger guest presenter, a celebrity-webcast-pioneer guest webcaster, some local media, the University President, archival and technological experts, a documentary filmmaker, and possibly a Minister of a federal department-that-must-remain-nameless until they get off their honourable fences and decide whether or not to grace us with their, erm, presences.

never mind that we still haven’t gotten word from Ottawa yet about whether we can fire off the press release…and the event is only 36 hours away.  i’m not nervous.

nope.  and not because of my mad skillz, or my overweening confidence.  no sir.  i’m not nervous because immediately after that four hour tightrope walk that will determine how these kids feel about this project for the rest of the six looming months they’re stuck with us actively and productively engaged in our learning fun, we up and hit the ground running for a teachers’ conference we’re running the very. next. day.

’cause we’re wild and crazy people.

wanna come?   think of it as BlogHer for the education profession, right here in humble PEI.  it shall rock.  especially if i remember to order lunch for everybody. 

of course, i will be at work by 8 am on Saturday morning.

withhold your jealousy.  just send drinks naps…and wish us luck.

…next week we return to your regularly scheduled parenthood.

i need to ask.

it has been pointed out to me in the past, by a certain someone who shall remain nameless but who lives in my house, is more than two feet tall, and is not a cat, that i sometimes overreact to petty bureaucratic irritations. this person attests that it was not necessary or helpful to shout obscenities at a customs official for charging a two hundred dollar duty on the forty-dollar sweater my mother sent one Christmas when we lived abroad, despite the fact that the charge was erroneous and due to Mr. Customs Official’s misinterpretation of the English on the packing slip, that he refused to listen to polite explanations of the distinction or grant us any access to a manager, and that he acted like an supercilious twerp from the moment we set foot in the office. this little voice of reason that lives and works with me also protested, quite forcefully, when i began to mutter threats on the life of the previously lamented skanky Easyjet agent, may her tanning bed burn her to a crisp, who brazenly - stop me if you’ve heard this one before - decided that the very same ticket that had gotten us from London to Prague this past spring suddenly didn’t allow for the very same three pieces of luggage that had been no problem four days before, and that would be $125 US fuck you very much.

yeh, okay, sorry…you tried to stop me, i know…it slipped out.

i don’t deal well with finding myself suddenly on the wrong side of rules i thought i’d been following along with reasonably nicely, particularly if random or irrational or fraudulent penalties are suddenly brought to bear upon me. i feel violated - more than is reasonable, i’m sure…or i’m told - by this type of encounter. but…i live with someone who keeps his cool, for the most part, in these situations of stupidness. who focuses on getting out them without international incident, and without focusing on the powerlessness they bring to boil in me.

so the fact that Dave this nameless soul of patience is pretty pissed right now too is completely messing with my head. what i need to ask is…how would you handle this tomorrow? because me…i want to bite people. and Dave seems amenable to this, in this particular instance. and that’s just weird.

we have a car. one small car. we have been insured by the same company - a Canadian company which advertises itself as the “people’s insurer,” having grown out of a cooperative insurance group started by some friendly farmers back, oh, you know, when the world was black and white - for the thirty-one months we’ve been back in Canada, and i was insured with them for the five years previous to my departure, too. we have our life and house insurance with this company as well as our auto insurance, though, irritatingly, they don’t seem to offer a method by which we could consolidate all our many payments. the life insurance comes out of our joint account monthly. the car and house are paid, by cheque or locally at the office, in biannual installments which come essentially quarterly because upon our return to this fair land we bought a car three months before we bought a house.

scintillating, no?

so, our car insurance comes due at the end of every January and July. this July, as you may remember, was a carnival of pestilence, guests, and work. the notice came to pay our car insurance, and we ignored it for a few days. then we went away for almost a week, spent some delightful vacation time in the hospital with O, and returned home, wretched and frazzled. when we got back, though, i noted that the car insurance came due the following Saturday, so i wrote a check. check made it into the mail using the company’s self-addressed envelope on Thursday…cutting it a little close…but the policy has a stated twelve day grace period. we’ve never used the grace period previously with this company, but their policy clearly states that it exists.

i was feeling quite proud of getting the damn thing sent and paid more or less on time, given the shape we’d all been in. ah, hubris.

fast forward eleven days. i had to bring Oscar to the doctor one Wednesday afternoon for a followup after his hospitalization the month before, so i swung home from work to pick up milk and some toys for my bag before going to his sitter’s to collect him. there was a message on the phone from the local office of the insurance company - a disembodied voice informed us that our insurance was about to run out, tomorrow, at the end of the aforementioned grace period. thinking how lucky it was that i’d happened home at an hour when their office was still open for business, i called back, thinking “oh, there must just be some mistake with the check.” i got a different agent than the one who’d called me, but no matter, she pulled our account up. no check. i said i’d sent it.

she said “when?” i said, Thursday, July 26th.

she said “where?” i said, to your Guelph, Ontario office, where the self-addressed envelope that came with my policy notice said to send it. duh.

she said “why?”

i started to think we were playing a very tiresome game of the five Ws, but explained that i’m in the habit of sending checks to the address that’s stamped on the envelopes that come soliciting them. she asked why i hadn’t dropped the check off at the local office. i explained that i work fulltime and hadn’t had the time off to take an hour off to drive to their office, wait in their foyer, and pay in person…plus they gave me that nice self-addressed envelope so i’d thought perhaps i should use it. she said something about it taking a really long time for things to get all the way to Guelph. i said nothing, but ruminated on the Christmas cards i sent my aunties in Guelph last year, which got sent a week before Christmas and were still in their hot little hands when i talked to them Christmas day, despite the holiday rush.

i started to think that perhaps this was not going so well, after all. i asked if i should call Guelph. the agent on the telephone assured me that she would follow up with a call, so they could “look for the check as it’s probably in their system somewhere” and would notify me if there appeared to be any problem or if our insurance for some reason was lining up to be interrupted. i decided that was great, as i had a baby to pick up and doctor’s appointment to take him to.

this was two weeks ago tomorrow. we came home tonight to a notice, from Guelph, dated ten days ago, telling us our car insurance has expired. or rather, it expired back on Saturday, July 28th. and that we can “apply for reinstatement”, but in the meantime, are shit out of luck in terms of any form of auto coverage. there has been no phone message, or even call display showing the number of the local agent. and that there will be an unspecified penalty.

thus, the residents of the crib, the tall and the small usually cranky about shit like this anyway, are pissed. because we sent the check and it had fourteen days to arrive and clearly local agent chick never called to follow up or notify them to look for it and now we’re out on our ear. despite the fact that we’ve never had a late payment. despite the fact that the envelope they sent was, erm, addressed to Guelph and if sending the frigging check to Guelph is not an effective system then for chrissake don’t stick their motherfucking address on the return envelope, people!

and we will apparently have to pay for the privilege of having them take us back, despite their rather inefficient system and its presumption that i’d be safer to take an hour off work to pay their damn bill because nothing actually clears their offices in normal postal delivery time.

we’re also grateful. that we haven’t backed into anyone while we unwittingly had, you know, no insurance.

i know this isn’t food, or anything. it’s car insurance, not a matter of foul injustice or life and death…much as i’d like to spit bubonic plague all over little miss “don’t call Guelph, we’ll call you,” i know what it is to be busy and work and let things slip. that’s where this all started. but…we cut the deadline close but follow their process with two weeks to spare, and we end up unable to drive, and having to pay a penalty to reapply to be insured, despite a perfect customer history? even though their agent and their offices’ disarray appear to be at least in part the reason that the insurance was cut off? i would have given the agent my credit card number for the damn payment while i had her on the phone, had she indicated in any way that this was a possibility. but nope. bah.

we live in a small enough city that we can walk Oscar to the sitter’s tomorrow and still likely walk into work on time. and it’s not January and brassmonkey cold out there. these are all precious blessings, yes…and i know it. people would give teeth for my problems.

but still, how would you handle this? what would you say, tomorrow, if you were walking my lazy ass to work and picking up the phone to call the insurance company?

should i try my best to kick their asses? or am i wrong to even think they’re being unreasonable in the first place?

i asked. i can take it. please reflect.