*************A vicious campaign of abuse and neglect.

Eve had a great birthday party on Saturday (more on that later). On Sunday (her actual birthday) he little girl from next door (who had come to the birthday party an hour early at noon and went home at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday) came over again and they played with birthday presents for hours, rejecting all offers of food and completely ignoring or shooing away all the adults in their general vicinity. Then, around eight o'clock, Eve came into the family room, looked at Matt and said reproachfully, and said "you know Daddy, I think only three people said happy birthday to me today. And none of them were you."

Angus went to a 'At Home on My Own' course on Saturday (to spare him the shrieky giggly joy of thirteen little girls painting aprons and baking monkey bread). They taught him a lot of logical, fairly obvious things that we probably had already told him, but somehow learning them in a classroom makes them seem more official. He came home with a certificate that Matt says he's pretty sure is 'legal permission to abandon our kid'. Angus's favourite thing was a list of things it said to answer yes or no to, such as "if you have a house key, you should keep it out in the open," "If you lose your house key you should make sure to tell everyone that it's lost", and "you should print your address on your house key in case you forget it". Angus was lunging around yelling "hey everyone, I lost my house key -- if you find it, make sure to go break into my house, the address is right on it!".

When Angus got home, he took one look at the remaining little girls and decided to retreat to my Mom and Dad's house for a sleepover. To give you a sense of how stringent the rules are at my Mom and Dad's house are, once I asked him if he wanted me to pack any toys or games as he was headed over there and he said, "Nah, I'm just gonna watch TV and eat stuff." When Matt went to pick him up, my Mom asked if he ever eats dinner when he comes home from her place. Matt said yes, he eats a full dinner. My Mom said 'well, the way he eats here, you'd think you never feed him', and Angus said 'that's right, they don't!' Matt made a disbelieving face at him, and Angus retorted, 'all you ever feed me is breakfast, lunch and dinner!'

I don't know how we've managed not to have them taken away.

************Dream a (weird) little dream

I'm currently up to my ass in birthday-party prep, so I'll just share Eve's dream from last night. She's been having a lot of nightmares lately, which often makes her afraid to go to sleep, and also lands her quite often in my bed at four a.m., so the fact that she had a funny dream was welcome news:

"First I dreamed that I was in a world made of Lego, and I was made of Lego too! Then I dreamed that I was back in Madame Waterfall's class and... this is embarrassing and I don't want to say it... but I will because it's so funny...(whispering) we were studying on butts! (pause for long, breathless belly-laugh). And Madame Waterfall said there's never been anyone in the world who had a butt that was bigger than them. And then we went on a field trip -- to China!!! And we saw someone whose butt was bigger than them! And Madame Waterfall said 'I guess I stand corrected'."

Sleep on that, friends.

***************I'm SO sorry, girl who was doing my pedicure!

There are certain things I've always been fastidious about. Some would say borderline obsessive-compulsive, and they wouldn't necessarily be wrong, but I prefer to think of it as being fastidious. Actually I don't love the word fastidious. Actually the more I type it and think it, the more I dislike it. The t and the d are too close together, and there's something unseemly about those two i's. So let's call it... meticulous? ANYWAY... I've always washed my face several times a day, especially when I'm wearing glasses instead of contacts, because I hate feeling like my face is oily and my glasses are sliding down my nose. I take a shower in the morning and usually a quick one at night, sometimes to regulate my wonky body temperature before going to bed, sometimes just to rinse off the day. When I had Angus and was exhausted and insane for the first few weeks, I thought that might break the bedtime shower habit. It didn't. Sometimes I even got up and combed my hair and brushed my teeth before breastfeeding at 2 a.m. And 3 a.m. And 5:30 a.m. Yeah, okay, even I can see that that doesn't so much put me in the non-crazy column. The point is, even though I have two kids and no memory now, even though I'm often depressed and lacking in drive and unlacking in ass, I generally took enough time to make sure I still looked presentable. True, this may have taken the form of looking in every mirror in every room I passed just to ascertain that my chin was too fat and my eyebrows were too thick and my forehead was somehow just too THERE, or taking down and putting up my hair six times, sitting on the floor crying and then wondering where the last forty-six minutes went and why my scalp was a little warm, but everybody defines 'taking pride in your appearance' differently, okay?

Over the past few weeks, though, something weird has been happening. I run errands, pick Eve up from school, take her home, wait for Angus to show up and get homework and dinner started. Normally I would have to wash my face, change my clothes and maybe even shower again. Now sometimes I don't get back to my mirror until bedtime. Sometimes I look okay. Sometimes I look bad. Whatever.

And then today, I was getting a pedicure with my friend Pam and I rolled up my pant legs and looked down and almost died of embarrassment.......... the hair on my legs was like FOUR INCHES LONG!!!!! And I don't think I've ever gone more than a day or two without shaving my legs. When girls in my residence would joke about only shaving once a week or not shaving until exams were over or even just not shaving as a matter of principle I would smile insincerely and wonder what on EARTH was WRONG with them (hey, I have principles. I just prefer them not to snag on my tights). And now even when I concentrate, I... I... I can't remember the last time I shaved my legs. (whimper)

I honestly don't know if I should be glad that I'm getting less obsessive, or sad that, clearly, I've finally decided to just let myself go.

On the bright side, the other afternoon I dropped in on Pam and she had jam in her hair.

(Sorry P., if I'm going down, I'm takin' everyone I can with me!)

**************Yes, I do get rather passionate about my tinned fruit

I've totally run dry. Empty. Echoing, with a little layer of dust in the bottom. I feel like I'm doing everything half-assed this week, with the one bright spot being that, for the most part, I'm at least still trying to do it. I dragged myself to the gym Monday and today. Today, amusingly enough, almost everybody I saw come into the gym looked half asleep. My friend Pam was on the treadmill next to me, in a similar state of brain-lock, and at one point she tried to say 'if you live in an apartment' but instead she said 'if you live in a hot tub', which resulted in twin bouts of hysterical laughter that earned us a few dirty looks and almost sent us flying off our treadmills.

Monday after working out I went down to get groceries. The plan was to work out, get what I needed for meals for the week and for Eve's birthday party on Saturday, go home and shower and go into the school library for the afternoon. And I needed canned peaches. Do you think I could find canned peaches? I walked up and down every aisle, then I looked at all the signs hanging from the ceiling. I saw canned vegetables. Canned fish. Snack fruit, but no canned fruit. I asked one grocery store employee. She sent me to the snack fruit aisle. There was no canned fruit. I asked another one. She sent me to the canned vegetable aisle. Canned peas and asparagus (shudder), but no canned fruit. Finally someone looked at the floor plan and sent me to aisle 6. The sign hanging above aisle 6 listed canned fish, crackers and bread sticks. Crackers AND bread sticks. They couldn't forego listing bread sticks in order to list canned fruit?

This extra ten to fifteen minutes of increasingly frustrating and futile canned-peach-seeking totally pushed me over the line from Monday morning foggy-but-functioning to Monday morning ready-to-stuff-myself-in-a-corner-and-sing-songs-from-Moulin-Rouge-in-a-sad-little-voice-ing. And the thing about the library is that Bonnie's out for surgery and it was a substitute, and Bonnie said go ahead and come in still, but really, why would I go put away books for someone who's getting paid to be there for two weeks and that's practically all she has to do? And all the stuff I had to do for Eve's party was spinning around in my head because I'm wacky that way, and I still had to go into Eve's classroom to do the math bags before the library and...

then it occurred to me. I'm a volunteer.

Sometimes I'm really good at missing the obvious. At least now I know where Loblaws keeps the freaking canned peaches.

Yeah, this post? Half-assed, like everything else this week. If you lived in a hot tub, you'd get it.

************Babel

You know how some things just don't translate well? The problem with having to write in French when you're basically English is that you can only 'think in French' so far. Sooner or later you're going to have to translate something that you think of in English into French, with variable results.

Some French words seem to me to perfectly match their English counterparts. 'Oeuf' is just fine for 'egg'. "Vert" works for 'green'. 'Chat' practically is 'cat'. And how do you say 'appalling'? -- 'épouvantable'. Isn't that fantastic? When I was in Germany with a friend, we were flipping through the dictionary and collapsed into giggles over the word 'uberspannt', which means stressed-out, or 'overstrung'. Her German cousin later made us t-shirts with the word on them.

But sometimes the results are rather less felicitous. Angus is currently doing a speech on the Greek Gods (thank-you Percy Jackson books). He did a rough copy and then while he was at school I was looking up a few words so I could help him edit it that night. One of the words he'd left in English was Zeus's 'thunderbolt'. I looked it up. I looked it up again. I switched to a different dictionary. I did everything I could to avoid having to write that Zeus's symbol was an 'éclair'.

Talk about losing something in the translation. I can't get this image of this hugely muscled shirtless dude with luxuriously white hair and a beard, standing on top of Mount Olympus, hurling chocolate pastries down on the targets of his displeasure.

************Is it just one last kick at the January suck-can?

I don't really know what the hell I'm doing posting right now. Monday is February 1st. I guess it's highly unlikely that I'm going to wake up all bright and shiny and January-bitchy-bitterness-free. Although now that I've written it down, it's more likely that I'll remember to call my sister and say happy birthday (is there something symbolically lovely about having a birthday on the first day that isn't January? Perhaps there is. Unless you're Elaine -- good thing it's my sister's birthday and not yours, huh, Elaine?). Truthfully, this January hasn't been as bad as past Januaries. For a large part of that I have many of you to thank, which I do, warmly, profusely, until you're slightly uncomfortable with my frenetic overzealousness. Being able to -- spew is such an ugly word -- vent, and have people acknowledge and sympathize and empathize is unbelievably cathartic and comforting. Before I started to blog (back when I said, many a time "I will absolutely categorically never blog" just to clarify precisely how wishy-washy and unprincipled I really am), I would look at blogs and think "well really, a lot of it is just a big mutual admiration society. How many people do you need telling you over and over again that you're a good person and you don't suck as a parent and you're not a big sucking useless drain on society?" It turns out that when you're the one involved in the mutual admiration, the answer is "many many people. No really, this is good, but are there any more people? Tell me again how green my eyes are, and how when my kids hate me it's all part of their natural development and not because I fed them too many hot dogs, and how last Wednesday wasn't my very last chance to ever make a postitive contribution to the world." I've read blog posts where people confessed things that they obviously felt were so horrifying, so shameful that all of their friends and/or readers would immediately abandon them in disgust, and I thought "Jeez, I do worse things that that on a weekly basis", and everyone else said the same. And it helps. In a real, actual, observable way. So thank-you.

But today? Today my husband is back (finally), but he's off all day with Angus at a hockey tournament. And I slept too late to be able to wash my hair before taking Eve to Irish Dance for extra rehearsals for the Crack thing. And I ended up in a van with two other women who both also claimed to have overslept but looked like fashion models. And I hate obsessing about my hair, but somehow it feeds into this whole 'being the best me I can be' crap. Like I'm failing some major life test by never getting the right hair cut, and never knowing what to do with the hair cut I get, and everyone else in the world even if they don't have great hair have normal hair, but the normal stuff doesn't work with my hair. Actually I guess it's my face that's the problem. I have a face that hair can't frame normally. I should work on face-camouflaging techniques.

Now Eve's at a birthday party next door. And I need to do my husband's sales-meeting/skiing in the Alps trip laundry. And clean the house for Eve's party next week-end. And figure out something for supper. And I'm out. I'm flat. I've got nothing.

But this week Eve made a get well card for Angus because he had a cold. Then she made a welcome back card for Matt because "this is the most much I've ever missed Daddy". And then she came upstairs and handed me a card that said "Thank you for everything Mom."

So fuck you January. Fuck you laundry. Fuck you messy house. I'm going to take my card upstairs and read a book.

*************WTF just happened?

Are your kids (if you have kids) doing the MS Read-a-thon in school (if they're in school)? Because holy crap, are my kids ever doing the MS Read-a-thon. Angus is quite into it but Eve -- she doesn't even know exactly what MS is, but this event, plus the 'contest' her class is in against the class next door to see who can read more -- has brought out shades of competitiveness and determination that were hitherto unsuspected. Okay, I'm lying, I totally suspected. Actually I flat-out knew. Since she was about four days old. Still, it's intense. Her teacher gives them little blue slips of paper that I have to initial and send back -- one for every 30 minutes she reads. And she's six. Thirty minutes is a long time to laboriously sound out words and fit sentences together. In fact, thirty minutes is kind of a long time to listen to someone laboriously sounding out words and fitting sentences together. But what am I going to do -- say that's enough reading for now? Hello, leg that I don't have to stand on.

So yesterday she's getting ready for another marathon session, and she comes to the table with an enormous Robert Munsch compendium. We have two of these -- Angus's French one, from a couple of Christmases ago, and her English one, from this past Christmas. I assumed she knew which one she had, but I guess I was wrong:

Eve: "Okay. I'm ready."
Me: "Okay. I'm listening."
Eve: "On...partage...toot"
Me: "Tout" (thinking -- that's weird -- she knows that word)
Eve: (turning page) "Le premier...hey! Why is this in French?"
Me: "Huh? Because...it's a French book."
Eve: "No it's not!"
Me: "Pretty sure it is. Let me see. Yep. L'univers de Munsch."
Eve: "How did it turn French?"
Me: "It's Angus's. Yours is upstairs."
Eve: "Angus has a Robert Munsch book? Since when?"
Me: "Christmas a couple of years ago. I thought you got his on purpose."
Eve: "Why would I want the FRENCH one?!!!!"
Me: "Um, because you're in French immersion and you read French every day?"
Eve: "No, I wanted mine! Where's mine? I'm going to get mine!"

(stomps away from the table, stomps halfway up the stairs. Pauses. Turns around, comes back downstairs, comes back to the table, opens the book)

Eve: (sweetly and calmly) "Actually I think a French book would be good for me."

Please excuse me from coherent conversation for the rest of the day. I have mental whiplash and I think I need to lie down.


Also, if you haven't read Tabatha Southey's rebuttal to Pat Robertson's claim that Haiti deserved the earthquake because of their alleged deal with the devil, and you feel like having an admiring giggle, you really should.