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he is getting so big.  and i see him so little when the days are washed and measured; so little time, really, for catching his eye and smiling, for playing, for holding him close while he still fits in my lap.

Saturday and this hits me, you see, right before we leave him for days to fly across an ocean, because the brain is a guilty, sentimental kind of muscle.  Saturday when he and i are mostly alone from 5:45 am on because Dave is working, and though that kind of early always finds me incompetent and staggering through the first few hours, it is still one of those sun-pours-in-like-butterscotch mornings that have been all too rare lately, gray days with flurries being the norm of the season this year.  the sun brings me back, suddenly, to last year’s cold, crisp winter when i was at home with a boy just learning to play, and just as suddenly the open rhythm of those cold, long, repetitive days seems utopian.  lately our days home alone, just O and i, have been storm days or sick days or just altogether draining days, me trying to catch up on the multitude of things to be done while a toddler wreaks havoc around me.  but Saturday, with the shafts of light beaming in on the floor, Oscar and i race toy horses round his train track, and line up Thomas the Tank Engine (and friends) all through his farmhouse in every possible permutation, and i can see through time to a Saturday someday when this playroom will be a dining room again, and the baby who will be 21 months tomorrow will be 21 for real and gone and grown.  and the two of us on the floor, huddled in pajamas on brightly-coloured playmats, laughing, are suddenly a snapshot to me, ghostly and precious and impossible to recapture.

we go for a walk a little later in the morning, O bundled within an inch of his life in the stroller, and we browse and window shop but mostly stay outdoors because it is a Great Affront to my opinionated young sir if i should try to remove the plastic windcover from his stroller or his hat or mittens from his person inside a store, despite the fact that i suspect he will melt if i do not.  and thus we bounce along the icy, crusty, slush-bound sidewalks, more flashbacks from the winter before and our daily walks to break the monotony of being housebound, and i had forgotten what a great workout pushing a stroller can be this time of year and i am happy and O is happy but the sun is in our eyes all the way back and between closing his eyes against the glare and all that bouncing, bouncing, by the time we arrive home he is fast asleep.

one of the visions i had of motherhood that never really came to pass was the one where i would sit, adoringly, with my sleeping offspring in my arms…or slip in by his bedside to watch him in the night.  O started life early and colicky, and sleep was a battle for a long time and one that no amount of rocking ever won, though i tried, and Dave tried.  he goes down easily, now, most nights, lies peaceably with his baby and his stuffed rabbit and his sippy cup of water after multiple stories, and we say goodnight and he says “bye bye!” and we seldom see him before, erm, 5:45 am…but slipping into his room is an urge i gave up on awhile ago, when my attempts resulted in dire regret.  so it’s rare that i get to watch him while he sleeps, this boy almost out of babyhood.

i drag the stroller up into the porch and remove the windcover and his boots and still he stays knocked flat out, snoring a little, lashes fluttering on his cheeks.  and i sit for a minute, smiling at him quietly.  i am joined by the cat, the two of us keeping vigil…one for novelty and love and one because the stroller is her preferred porch perch and i believe she was trying to stare him into wakefulness.

as i watch him, time slips for me again to the permutations of possible futures, and i can see in the shape of those still-baby-fat cheeks the stubble that will come, and the harsher planes of bone, and i am struck with the realization that someday someone else, perhaps, will watch him sleep like this, drifting, lashes fluttering, on a pillow probably far away from here.  and i remember mornings of my own past, waking next to those chosen or ill-chosen few who suddenly, in sleep, seemed impossibly beautiful to me and how i was filled with tenderness and knew that i was in trouble, or love, if the two are ever different.

the same tenderness filled me Saturday morning, watching my boy asleep in his stroller, understanding that i am in love in a way that swallows me whole and that this one i cannot even wish to have grow old with me, because such is not the way of things.

he will grow, and he will – i hope – find his own way, his own loves, his own sun-filled mornings with lovers or with children.  but this time i caught the snapshot – two, actually – for later, for the time when these moments are only memory.

and in keeping with the brand-new all-technology all-the-time motto here at the crib (don’t worry, i can’t keep this up), i present to you my son. twenty months old. on his first skates.

yes, we are so Canadian it hurts. now go coo at my offspring, y’hoser.

um…please.

for big and for small.

three little boys here all together at Grandmaman & Grandpapa’s house, the whole clan, Catholics and Jews and a lapsed Protestant and the atheist all overeating in fellowship, playing with trucks and trains and sleds and plastic duckies, chocolates hidden away until darkness falls and the babies are asleep. 

Oscar has discovered – probably at the babysitter’s – that there IS such a thing as Santa Claus.  joyous greetings of “Sha sha!” fill the house, discoveries of fat men in beards and red suits around every corner, as Grandmaman is well-decorated.  the snow continues to delight.  snowmen, built by older cousins, are better than Christmas itself.

and yesterday morning, watching Oscar and his cousins, all born within two years of each other, race firetrucks around the basement like small, happy banshees, it struck me with an urgency that i haven’t felt in ages…the ache, the absence of the little second-born cousin who should be there in that pile.  my first child, darkest-haired of these four boys, forever smallest.  and the tears welled up and spilled but i could swear i felt him there for an instant, felt him in that longing, knew him all over again, celebrated him.  and that was a Christmas gift, that instant where i could see him, almost, a wee shadow with the other boys, all laughing.

may you all have joy this season, and peace.  we too, are blessed, every one.

it is, for those of us who celebrate on the Christmasy end of the holiday spectrum, a season of wishing.

when i was a kid, it was wishing – with an ache and excitement so pure i can still nearly taste it almost thirty years later – for some cherished marvel carefully selected from the pages of the Sears Christmas catalogue, the wish book that arrived in July and provided my mother with hours of free childcare in the ensuing months.

when i was older and away from home for years and years, it was wishing – this time with a different ache – for comfort and joy and some sense of meaning and familiarity from whatever celebrations got cobbled together in places far from family, where the small rituals and traditions that had marked the season for my mother, my grandmother and i had little place.

now that i am a ripe old thirty-five and barely holding, i am still wishing.  but this year’s wish, oh Santa, it’s the simplest ever.  and the least likely to be granted.  i am wishing for sleep.

copious, bounteous sleep, the heavenly peace kind that the Christmas carols make sound just so damn luxurious and restful.  i want piles of it.  i want to be saturated in it, as if it were mulled wine and i was a plump, boiling raisin.  i want it bad.  and i don’t want to horde it, either…i’d like to share it around, wrap it up, give it as a present.  to Oscar, particularly, and to Dave.  because he’s been trying to give me extra by cutting into his own, bless his little heart, but it’s starting to show.

early Friday afternoon, i was hunched over my desk at work, researching Creative Commons Licensing and trying to write an email to a bunch of tech developers without sounding like a hopeless Luddite.  i was wishing that my headache would disappear, because some kind of ick had settled across my temples and in my throat like it planned to stay awhile, scratching to dig itself in. then i got the phone call: the babysitter.

Oscar had been down with the progenitor of my own case of ick throughout the week, resulting in Dave and i alternating half days home with him, or picking him up early and then catching up on our own missed work later into the evenings.  since he also wakes up earlier when he’s sick, poor lamb, the long winter naps in our household had been growing steadily shorter.  but Friday morning, despite an ungodly early start, he’d seemed good.  better.  we’d dropped him off at the sitter’s and trotted off to work.  until the sitter called just after lunch to say that his temperature had spiked three degrees and her own daughter seemed to be coming down laryngitis and really, maybe it would be better if i came to get him.

i grabbed my gloves – i was already wearing my coat, as my office is in a former cold storage room in the university library, and when they decommissioned the “storage” part of its handle they forgot to do something about the “cold” bit – and hit the road. picked up my glassy-eyed, wretched-looking little boy and bundled him home, where i administered infant Tylenol and sat with him in the rocking chair, singing Christmas carols and petting his ducky fluff head until he fell asleep.

then i took some nice extra-strength Tylenol for my own sick head (alas, the company pays nothing for all this fine sponsorship), crept downstairs, opened the computer and started in on my email to the tech dudes again, thinking how pleasant it is to work in these flexible times, where much of what i’m lucky enough to do is portable. secretly i was hoping that the late nap and the Tylenol would combine in O to produce a sleep so heavenly and drawn-out that i could basically get done everything i would have done at work, while still listening for my boy and feeling like a good mother. and enjoying the central heating of my own home, to boot.

ha.

ten minutes. ten whole minutes it lasted, that sleep. then little barking coughs so loud and urgent that i knew he couldn’t sleep through them, and…moments later…the cries. i went upstairs, picked him up, sat back in the rocking chair with him while the coughs wracked his hot little body. and then, faster than you can say “Merry Freaking Christmas,” he gagged and let loose with a spray of vomit so powerful and potent that he covered me like toilet at a frat party. still in my work clothes, holding a sick, frightened hot little child who i wanted to hold close and comfort, but didn’t really want to marinate in vomit.

there was no more napping that day.  the rest of the weekend’s been kinda the same.  little Oscar Lou Who, who is no more than two, has been a sad, sad specimen of a wee holiday urchin, without much interest in eating, sleeping, playing, or really anything at all.

but there’s Christmas shopping still to do, and groceries that need to be bought for the hugantic storm that’s coming this way today, and a fugly fake tree that i put up ten days ago but still need to decorate, plus piles of pukey, diapery laundry, and all that missed work to catch up on from last week…and a Christmas party last night and cards that still have to get written if they’re going to reach anybody before 2008 and i swear, baby Jesus, all i want is a twelve-hour nap.

so nine days before Christmas, just in case anybody’s been wondering what to get me, this is my wish…a little more healthiness, and a lot more sleep, and maybe a few elves to get caught up on all that seasonal stuff that this old Grinch hasn’t gotten to yet.  and maybe the heart to do it all.

but especially the sleep, if somebody could please slip that down the chimney with some eggnog…?

Oscar Lou Who (who looks just like this, minus the pink bows) would thank you.

when i was a little girl, elementary-school age, i went to bed every single night all winter long fantasizing about two things…two magical overnight transformations.

the first involved me waking up with long, flowing locks of hair – preferably curly – instead of my real-life mushroom cut, which made me look rather like someone had tied a dog dish to my head and snipped around it. the second was about snow days.

i never got the former until high school, but the latter – bless you, frozen north of Canada – were relatively regular occurrences. waking up to a world blanketed in snow and having the rush of routine and everydayness startled into vivid, cozy technicolour by the cancellation of school and the prospect of a whole unforeseen day of leisure: definitely magic. in my adulthood, it’s occurred to me that snow days have all the side benefits of tragedy – the release from menial responsibilities and work duties, the gathering together, the shedding of unnecessaries – without the actual, erm, tragedy. they’re the candy on the calendar.

and since i am, by trade, a teacher, and currently work at a university, i still get to experience the luxury of snow days even now that i’m long grown. this morning, in the darkness, two lazy adults stretched out under the duvet listening to the peeping, “i’m awake now, thank you” sounds emanating from the other bedroom and the long, long list of cancellations coming from the radio. after the peeper was retrieved and changed and fetched some milk, the three of us retreated back under the covers in hopes of hearing the magic words. and they came: a snow day.

now, we’re still working, for part of the day, because the kinds of work we do can be done online and we still have power and all those good things. but i also got to get other things done – things that would have been pushed off to the weekend, like dragging the fake Christmas tree into the porch to air out, and getting the new hemp liners for O’s diapers boiled and ready for use. homey things. i will put something in the crock pot to cook in an hour or so, just ’cause. and i got to start it all late, because after the cancellations came, Dave and Oscar left me in the bed alone for two solid hours of rollicking, dreaming, rejuvenating morning sleep, my very favourite kind.

i hope it’s a very stormy winter.

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Oscar has taken to the arrival of snow in his world with great interest, bordering on fetishism. we have shutters on the inside of our bedroom window, and this morning just as the sun was coming up, before he and Dave departed to let me sleep, he pulled himself up on the old wooden crate that sits under the window, holding books, and threw open the shutters, shouting “‘no! ‘no!” and beating his little hands with glee on the frosted window. later, when his father got dressed for shovelling, O grabbed a hat of his own and a pair of adult gloves from the basket in the closet and beelined for the back door. he was outraged when we wouldn’t let him outside to play. he tamped his feet on the mud porch floor, then, with great frustration and deliberateness, shook his gigantically be-gloved paws at us and said, very clearly, “mitt. hat. ‘no.”

it must be a terrible trial to have parents so stupid that they can’t even tell when you’ve dressed yourself to go outside on a snow day.

right on cue, straight from December’s central casting, we had snow today, making the leftover pumpkin in my back porch look suddenly very out of place indeed. winter has begun.

it is the beginning of the dark season, of the advent creep through the darkness – through the wonderful, bare-bones nadir of solstice – back to light. it is a season of hibernation and turning inward…and, old carry over from a semi-religious childhood, of counting the December days off, one by one, enduring the wait ’til Christmas, ’til all the candles can be lit again.

lying awake in bed last night, unable to sleep for hormonal nosedive of sudden post-pregnancy, i smiled, wryly. i realized that – for once – i’ve got impeccable timing. the symbolism of the Christian advent – the hope of a child, a second coming – does not escape me. because this coming month will be cold-molasses slow…i can see that already, one day in. i am all aflurry, urgent, heart unwilling to accept the do not pass Go – return to start card crumpled in my hand. when i sleep i dream of babies floating by, slipping from my grasp. i waken, stricken, compelled. i fantasize about twins, like a crazy woman. waiting this month out, aching to start again, to leap back on the hamster wheel of hope, will be almost as agonizing as waiting for Christmas that year i was six and had my whole heart set on the magical wonderland of the Weeble Haunted House. almost.

and i know this is normal. i am resigned to a little crazy with my fruitcake over the next few weeks, in the eternity of waiting for things to settle, for a cycle to establish itself, for my body to do what it needs to in order to heal. and i hope in the process there will be some letting go, some lessening of the urgency. but in the meantime i will count out the days of December, like a child with an advent calendar of chocolate, walking out the long wait with good company and the comfort of treats. because treats, in our house, are a big deal…as you can see.

it is such a secret place, the land of tears.
– Antoine St. Exupery

 i got my first positive pregnancy test three years ago today.

we were trying, but i was so sure that we could not possibly ever get a positive on the first try – i’d been told since i was sixteen that i was an iffy ovulator – that i waited until i was three days late to test. and even then, when Dave and i flipped that little stick over after the two minute wait, the two clear lines staring back at us left me with an overwhelming sense of unreality, as if i’d – magically, happily, gratefully – landed in a scene my imagination had never fully dared flesh out.

i’ve pretty much felt the same ever since…stunned and unprepared.

only a week after that first positive test, i started to bleed. we were in Korea then, and it was a Saturday night, so Dave and i bounced from emergency room to emergency room all over our city of a million souls, looking for one with an English-speaking doctor on duty. after an hour on a stretcher literally one curtain away from a woman in the full-on throes of labour, i was brought into an exam room where a new curtain was dropped between me and my nether regions. the perky nurse then proceeded, with no explanation but many cheery smiles, to insert some small and painful object into my lady parts. panicked by the ensuing sounds of liquid, i asked in very bad Korean what she was doing…and she answered “draining,” most sunnily. dear god, i thought, they’re vacuuming me out without even checking to make sure the baby’s gone! turns out it was actually a catheter. i nearly fainted with relief.

but my relief was only temporary. i did not miscarry Finn, but kept him long enough to believe we were safe, past danger, and that my traumatic first experience of prenatal care was just a funny story. it turns out it was more of a hazing, a gentle initiation into how the road to motherhood would be for me: overly invasive and kind of a shock to the system, every step of the way. i was reminded of it again the other day, listening to the sounds of a newborn in the hallway outside the room where Dave & i waited for my d&c, realizing that not once – after three pregnancies, two live births, and one reasonably non-crisis-type birth – have i ever gotten to do what that new mother was doing with her newborn: just sitting with him or her, nursing, breathing, holding. even after Oscar’s birth i was whisked away, completely unprepared, to the OR to tear open my unwanted epiosotomy and retrieve the placenta. i waited there for hours in the middle of the night, shaking, unable to believe that a living baby would be waiting for me when they finally saw fit to bring me back.

this is where i am these days, after this miscarriage. i am grieving, though not this pregnancy per se…not solely that, or even primarily that. i am grieving all of it, this whole road, all the damage done along the way. i feel like meat that has been gouged, roughly and repeatedly. the road into motherhood has brutalized every single cherished hope and expectation i ever had of it, and made me wonder what it was about my simple hopes that was so unreasonable, so completely impossible to fulfill?

not all has been sorrow and burden, not at all. moments with Oscar have been gifts of the surprise variety: magic in the way his sticky little hand fits into mine, gratitude for his healthy mind and body, more or less, the wild beauty of those first, tentative, successful communications where he and i shared a giggle, a moment of joy. i could not have been raised in a way that prepared me less to parent a son, and yet i am enriched by this man-child in ways that make the idea of any alternative life seem intolerably black & white. blindly, i’m fumbling my way through a job both more drudgerous and more joyful than i ever imagined it could be.

but each bend this road has taken in and out of the land of tears has left me breathless, in a shock primal and visceral enough that i can barely stay standing, let alone walk. and i am there right now, on my knees, trying to dust myself off and let go of the counting of weeks and hopes, unwind myself back to zero. it is hard. it makes me angry…which for me is really just a way of saying i hurt. i hurt badly, and i do not want to. if i yell loud enough, can i frighten you away, sadness? but sadness is, alas, hard to scare. and the worst of it, this particular time, is that there is so little this loss can add to the vast sum of lessons learned last time that it simply feels like a rehash, like having scabs torn off for no purpose except random amusement. so i sit with all these old wounds piled up around me on the road, unable to go forward just yet, in this secret landscape that i cannot really call up with words, and yet that i know so many of you walk in too, our ghosts passing each other.

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i am not used to this. i’ve struggled, i’ve been disappointed and broken-hearted in other places. but the desire for children, when you have it, is so primal and success so completely out of your personal control, that it’s a mindfuck…especially when it goes badly. and the world’s way of dealing with it – which is largely to say as little as possible, even among medical personnel, even in circumstances that are obviously tragic and awkward – only furthers that sense of surreality. the surgery doctor greeted me Monday with a hearty “it’s d&c day!” and yeh, i was happy and relieved to be getting things over with. but the date wasn’t marked in my calendar with sunbeam stickers, y’know? yesterday, when i called my regular OB to make a follow-up appointment, i was told late January was the best they could do. which means i’ll be 36 by the time anyone looks at my cervix to see what damage, if any, this surgery has wrought, and if there is damage it’ll be scar tissue by then. sigh. but what really hurt was the callousness. if you answer the phones for an OB practice, and someone calls to say they had a d&c two days ago for a missed miscarriage, is it really so hard to say “i’m sorry?” it ought to be sheer reflex. even if you don’t mean it…just acknowledge me, my sorrow, my circumstances. the day after Finn died, my first day on my feet in three long weeks, a nurse at the desk on the bedrest ward i’d been returned to suggested i try walking to the lounge, to build my strength. they were having a baby shower for the other, still-pregnant residents of the ward at that time…in the lounge. she never made eye contact with me again.

clearly, i’m raw. i will heal…i’ve been walking this road long enough to know that no stopping place is permanent. we will try again…and the prospect fills me with wry humour as well as hope, because i wonder if such gluttony for punishment isn’t unhealthy, when experience blatantly suggests that perhaps we’d be more successful with a different pursuit of the heart, like, say rescuing kittens?

but, for all the damage and the hurt, i do not regret the last three years, nor starting out on this road. it has been hard, far worse than i ever expected. but far more worthwhile too, for all the tears.

and i still get to hope, when three more years roll around, that we will have more happy stories to add to the collection, more joy, more children in our house.

when one is in the midst of a torturous limbo, it is very helpful to have a toddler around.

with a toddler around, it’s difficult to slip entirely into the doldrums. not only are there beams and giggles to buoy one up, but also the adrenalin of constant demands that threaten to escalate into disaster: one’s toddler may at any moment morph into a raging hippopotamus if one is not on one’s guard for signs of impending recalcitrance. this keeps one busy. as does the constant rampage of activity that doesn’t leave an excess of time for thought of any sort, let alone the melancholy kind. and the headbutts – a reliable and loving source of maniacal toddler laughter – that must be neatly dodged if one wishes to escape concussion…they’re good too.
basically, Oscar is a comfort to me. an exhausting comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.

however, he’s not a great listener.

i don’t mean in the “please put your shoes over there, Oscar” sort of way. he’s pretty entertained by the praise he gets for compliance with these little locational requests, so he listens, and beetles around, placing objects in their respective spots. and we clap. we’re either teaching orderliness or an unhealthy reliance on external motivations…yay for parenting by guesswork! at least the closets are tidy.

it’s in the deeper realm of heart-to-heart communications that O’s skills seem…off. i hold him tight before bed these nights, breathing in his downy head, and i tell him, low and soft, how much his mama loves him. and he kicks me, hard. or i pet him gently, rocking, while he shouts “baaaaaaa!” with the intensity of a rugby captain. i get the feeling we’re out of sync, my boy and i, in the give and take of our conversations. and it’s not just him. the other day, he gazed into my eyes with grave seriousness and pronounced, “ma ba guh weewa papap oooo.”

and i thought, erm, yes dear. was that “the cat is orange, mama”, or “i have existential angst about my place in the world”? ’cause, y’know, they maybe warrant a different response, just possibly. but me? clueless.

clearly, i do not speak toddler.

communicating with Oscar these days reminds me of my early days abroad, in whatever country i happened to be in at a given time, since i spoke the local language of, erm, not a single place i ever went. (except Scotland. but i didn’t understand them either). rather, i spent most of my life as an expat engaged in the exaggerated and poorly paid art of mime, at which i came to believe i excelled. whenever i wanted something whose name was not in my minimal vocabulary, why, i did not fear, oh no. i stepped boldly over the threshold of whatever nearby establishment seemed most likely to be related to my need, armed with a smile, and began to gesticulate wildly and frantically to the poor soul behind the counter. drinks and smokes and stationery? no problem. bus tickets? all good. toilet paper? sometimes a little more embarrassing to act out…especially for the third time in a row, when one’s confused – or bemused – charades partner keeps directing one off to the toilets (which, outside North America, seldom come with built-in wiping materials) rather than ponying up the paper goods to bring to said toilets. when i first found myself pregnant with Finn, in Korea, requesting “pregnancy test” from the lady at the local pharmacy turned out to be a passion play that involved half the neighbourhood and may have left one older gentleman scarred for life by that brazen foreign hussy and her penchant for peeing on babies.

these exchanges, always, were earnest and intense, peppered by basic words in two languages, but often completely at cross-purposes.

which is, i think, what’s happening with O and i. we don’t share the same language, right now. we share an understanding of simple nouns, in English, and if we keep our conversations confined to that subject matter then we can chat along like a house on fire. but whenever we get past basic requests for water or a kiss, observations of “a bird!” or “a plane!”, we struggle. we are like citizens of different countries, thrown together in the same house, each trying desperately to comprehend why the other acts so bizarrely, and figure out what s/he wants. and we flap our arms, or wheedle and cajole, or grin and babble and throw tantrums, all in the name, i think, of that very basic human desire: to be understood.

and even if he can’t fully understand me, he’s already doing exactly what i want and need…my small, funny, semi-foreign son, reminding me – no matter what – that not all is lost.

looking back, i’m pretty sure Dave started it.

it was a few months back now, when O was really beginning to get his legs under him and not just walk, but climb. or want to, at least. but there aren’t a whole lot of things in this house that someone with very short, very stubby eleven-inch legs – which do not come from my side of the family – can actually make his way up and around in any fashion that holds the interest of a one-year old. the guest futon had grown dull. his own chair? we kept making him sit down in it. so the Boy grew creative. or…got his revenge.

he began climbing us. and sitting on us, when ever we were prone. which given that we have been enthusiastic subscribers to the horizontal parenting program ever since Oh the Joys first began selling it thru Amway promoting it on her blog, is quite frequent. we are not tall folk, nor energetic ones. we like to be near the earth.

our offspring, though? not so much. he wants to scale the fleshy heights.

it began innocently enough, one morning when Oscar was playing the ever-delightful game of climbing Mt. Daddy, who was lumbering in bed, lollygagging. O managed, for the first time, to actually clamber up onto the small of his father’s back, where he seated himself like a seasoned cowboy and raised a small hand in gleeful pride. i cooed. Dave, wakened by the weight on his bladder, bucked like a pony bronco. Oscar squealed with happiness.  much bouncing ensued.  all normal.

but plain old horsey rides grew dull, unchallenging.  Oscar, seeker of xtreme thrills, began searching for new parental mountains to climb.  riding our legs was boring.  sitting astride our necks held a brief charm for him, if we both found it faintly suffocating…but it was when he discovered that he could sit atop our heads and make us cry like babies that he really began to enjoy himself.

every morning at our house, far too early, a small voice begins to howl.  a parent rises, sometimes making the futile attempt to encourage the owner of said small voice to return to slumber – or at least silence – for another brief but blessed period.  more usually, the small voice and its owner are brought into the parental bed for a cuddle and some milk.

i say cuddle.  by this i mean parents lie back down and pretend to catch five minutes more rest while offspring trods all over them, spilling milk as he goes.  it’s very intimate, a bonding time, but with a WWE kind of flair.  especially since the head fetish started.  having ones hair trod on and pulled wholesale from its roots isn’t pleasant at the very best of times.  having one’s hair trod on and pulled wholesale from its roots by a maniacally laughing short-legged demon perched atop one’s face, bouncing and wearing a very very wet and pissy diaper?

apparently, if you’re the fetishist in question, it’s indescribably fun, replete with occasional toddler tossing and muttered curses and cries from the tortured.

as the injured party, whose beseiged hairstyle is quickly returning to that unfortunate asymetrical look that we who lived through 1983 swore we would never speak of again, it is not the alarm clock i would necessarily choose.  but dude…it works!  piques the senses, gets the flight or fight mechanism going…good times.

did i mention i blame Dave?  as penance, he most generously gets up with the wee demon love, whilst i catch another wink or three.  bless his heart.  i’ve written to the Pope asking for him to be canonized.

toddler available to be at YOUR house for ungodly early wakings – a failsafe alarm clock system, just $29.99 per single use!  brimming with urine cuteness!  hair alteration included free of charge!  call now!  (must be fed in order to deactivate stamping and giggling mechanism. father unit not included.)

so…erm…what are mornings like at your house?

just in case you’ve been thinking, like i have been, that you need a weekend away from the same old vistas or you’re going to tear your own eyes out from the eternal hamster-wheelness of it all, and you’re burning to hit the road and see leaves and visit cousins and meet blog friends in the flesh and drink Belgian beers and possibly even shop where they stock clothes for women under sixty yet years-past-ingenue-enough for the inventory at Le Chateau, well, i have a recommendation for you.

(this is good advice…wisdom i’ve been repeatedly if unwillingly collecting over the past number of months. learn from my mistakes, oh ye who crave a pinch of novelty and have been pining for your getaway.)

do not, i repeat not, be tricked into trading in your weekend away for what may appear at first to be a reasonable facsimile. oh no. do not fall for this terrible bait and switch that i have, alas, been prey to. yet again.

a trip to the hospital does not a vacation hankering satisfy, friends.

contrary to beliefs you may have held dear, the mere fact that a destination is not your workplace or your house does not automatically make it a gay old time.

just because exam rooms in hospitals are like the House of Possible Horrors for parents meant to contain their very small children in there where everything at a small person’s eye level is sharp, metal, tippy, and contains moving parts – and the damn door can’t be shut to keep said small people from running out into the hallway and colliding with gurneys, lab carts, and other patients. all. the. time – that does not mean that they are worth the price of admission.  even if admission is paid for by your tax dollars at work.

just because you too are feeling a little under the weather does not mean you will be offered any soothing medications, as you are merely there – in the eyes of the institution – as a herder for the small patient you have brought them.

and just because it’s bread pudding day in the cafeteria won’t make up for the Belgian beer, you know. but you should have two bowls of pudding anyway.

ultimately, just because today is the 18 month anniversary of the night you waddled – at ten minutes to midnight, and about half an hour later than was really wise – to the door of the local hospital to drop your young labour your unhealthy if beloved offspring into the world, it does not mean that you are therefore actually obliged to return to said hospital today for a sentimental visit. in fact, it will not actually occur to you, in the haze that marks pre-dawn darkness in your caffeine- and sleep-deprived brain, that this is the anniversary of that auspicious evening.

no, what will occur to you as you sit for hours in a small room with a one-day-short-of-eighteen-month-old with breathing difficulties but a nonetheless highly energetic disposition is rather as follows (sung to the tune of The Gambler in very cheery and i’m-really-not-a-sulky-mommy-who-just-wanted-one-weekend-away-as-a-family-without-plague tones…with apologies to Kenny Rogers and any of the poor hospital staff who may have had to endure my caterwauling):

on a warm autumn morning
in a family bound for nowhere
(at least this weekend) – the backup singers kinda add that effect, you really have to hear it in my head to fully appreciate it
i hung out with an Oscar
we were both too tired to sleep
so we took turns a coughin’ and a weepin’ wheezin’ in the darkness
’til boredom overtook him
and he began to speak.

he said “mama babbee dada
bab buh doh nana muk
ga vvvooo aaa! mamama
wah wah wah wah”**

it kind of went on like that for a bit, delineating all of Oscar’s increasingly impressive if still not very enunciatory vocabulary, until we got to the rousing chorus:

you gotta know when to go in
yeh, know when to throw in
give up your holiday
because you done got sick
you gotta hang out in the hospital
and then go home feeling pitiful
yes indeed this is your weekend
and it surely does suck…erm…donkeys.

yes, David Bowie will be calling me for lyrics any day now. i got skillz. that more than comforts me as i face yet another wild Saturday evening in Charlottetown, sick, with my poor little Herr Cough Cough.

at least the vacation was free, bread pudding aside. thank you jeebus, for Medicare.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
in all seriousness…do any of you out there have little ones who’ve been diagnosed with asthma? this hasn’t happened for Oscar yet, but as every single time he gets a cold he ends up having to be brought to the hospital for masks (the home Ventalin wasn’t cutting it this morning, though we do have two puffer souvenirs from our exciting hospital visits on previous non-cancelled vacations) and as during the four weeks between hospital visits this last stretch he never really managed to shake his cough at all, the doctors are suggesting we may be heading in that direction. what did the road to asthma look like, for you? what kinds of minimization strategies have you been given, if any? any thoughts about taking him to a naturopath or someone on that end of the medical spectrum to at least try to find out why his immune system’s been so vulnerable of late? advice welcome. we’d like to stop seeing O miserable.

…and Dave suggests he’d like to see me stop sulking about my lost vacations.

fat chance, buster. it’s my art.

**translation of the Oscar-speak**
mama baby daddy
ball book door banana milk
car blue cat! mask more
wah wah wah wah
(yes, “mask” – as in what delivers the Ventalin – is not only one of his first twenty or so words, but i swear to god he asked for more mask while we were playing with it during our rather extended attempts at entertaining ourselves in the exam room.)