Bibliomama

All this happy exciting stuff is exhausting. Things are still great. Friday was a great visit with friends and then I spent the evening at one of my favourite places with some friends, while Angus's baseball team won the city championships. Saturday was an amazing end-of-season game at someone's beautiful backyard with a pool, a hot tub and a trampoline -- 15 boys and three girls, swimming or bouncing for eight hours straight. We've been really lucky with other team parents in baseball and hockey -- they're all really nice and either really like us or fake it well. Yesterday Matt left for Washington and I took the kids to my parents' house for dinner. My Mom gave them some rocket balloons and they had a hilarious time blowing them up and firing them off in the backyard -- I love when Angus decides he's going to be a goofy little boy again for a while. Plus we only almost caused one car accident by causing a deflated balloon to drop on someone's winds...

My word for last week was 'fortuitous'. In the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, the primary definition of fortuitous is simply 'occurring by chance'; it's only the second definition that has the 'fortunate, lucky' connotation which much of us attach to the word. But that's okay because this is my blog and I say 'fortuitous' means 'happening by a lucky twist of fate that makes you feel all fresh and grapefruity'. Those who wish to challenge my definiton may line up on my right where you may bite me, one by one, in a calm and orderly fashion. On Monday morning my Mom and I went downtown to the Market to do some fruit-buying, flower-looking, gelato-eating and general happy summer wandering. I parked at the place where you pay the machine for a ticket that goes on your dashboard. You can only park there for an hour, but since we're wandering in the vicinity anyway it's easy enough to feed the machine. As we pulled up, a man w...

There was a key in my mailbox today, which is always very exciting because it means there's a package in one of the bigger boxes at the bottom. I thought it was some clothes that I'd ordered, so I was perplexed when the package was hard and cornery. Then I realized it was books and I was excited. Then I realized it was free books and I was elated. House of Anansi sent me copies of Annabel by Kathleen Winter and Far to Go by Alison Pick (which was already on my to-read list) to review -- beautiful fresh slippery smooth sensually intoxicating hardcover copies. When I'm done making out with them I will review them. This reminded me that I when I started this blog I thought I would be writing about books a lot more. I just can't seem to find a style of reviewing that fits in with the flow that this blog has kind of developed on its own -- I mean the flow that I've subconsciously developed, because lord I hate it when authors say stuff like "well I didn'...

Time for Knowing Me Knowing You August with the Fairy Blogmother, for which I am heartily grateful because my husband is back from China therefore the pressure is off therefore cue the total loss of my will to live. It's been a gray and rainy week-end which matches my gray and rainy mood, I read a gray and rainy book and sat in front of my computer and obsessively checked and rechecked my email and Facebook and kept not receiving the email or comment that would transform my day into a wonderland of colour and passion. I made resolutions to stop eating crap and followed them up by eating crap (washed down with a searing shot of irony). I have further resolved that the wallowing shall end precisely at midnight. Okay, the wallowing will end whenever I drag my ass out of bed in the morning. There will be mostly no wallowing tomorrow.  1. What is your favourite kind of pie?  Cherry. Or coconut cream. I don't know, I'm not that heavily invested in pie. Or pi, except in ...

I saw something horrifying in the paper today. It was an ad for The Bay about Maidenform's new bra, 'Like Magic'. Apparently it (shudder) increases the bust by two sizes. I can't even bear to think about it. Eve and Angus are having supper while I'm not really paying attention. Eve sort of chokes and coughs a bit. I ask her if she's okay and she doesn't answer so I ask again a bit louder. She says yes, but keeps coughing. Angus says "take a drink, Eve!". Eve says, in an extremely annoyed tone, "I just did and it made me choke!" Email from Angus to my husband after his baseball game on Monday night: hi dad, so we played Orleans yesterday and we tied 7-7 but we should have won. What happend was there was a wild pitch so the runner on third scored. But the catcher threw the ball over the pitcher but the third baseman got it and threw it home. The pitcher blocked the plate and the runner slide beside it and the pitcher tagged him. But the ump...

A couple of weeks ago Eve was in drama camp. They spent the week doing improvisation games, movement exercises, making costumes and props and working on little plays to present to the parents at the end of the week. They were awesome. They were all based on Greek myths -- Echo and Narcissus, King Midas, The Labours of Hercules and one other one I can't remember, but it was awesome because they were all awesome. Eve was King Midas's daughter -- she ran in yelling "Daddy!", got turned into gold, stood like a statue for a bit, got turned back to life (I'm not sure that really happened in the myth) and ran around shouting "I'm alive! I'm alive!", being out-hammed only by the drama King himself, the boy who played Midas. Eve's friend Marielle was Echo, who loved the sound of her own voice too much for Hera's liking, so she was cursed to only be able to repeat the words of others, and then to fall in love with Narcissus, who was only in lo...

I know, referencing Beckett in the summer probably violates some kind of blogging statute, and if it doesn't it should. I'm suffering from a surfeit of frivolity -- too much sun and sandboxing, too many dance parties. Zarah and the kids left yesterday morning and I spent the day being narcoleptic -- any time I stopped moving for five seconds I dozed off. We had all been preparing for my husband to go to China for a week, and he hugged Angus before he left in the morning because Angus was going for a birthday party sleepover. After Angus got picked up Eve announced that she wasn't feverish any more and she wanted to go somewhere because she was bored. Since I figured that napping at the wheel of a moving minivan probably wasn't the greatest way to cap off the week, I packed her off to my mother's (because somehow watching tv at Grandma's house is infinitely more fun than watching tv at home). Then I was driving home with blissful visions of a nap, then a sc...

..............When it's a volcano, a pool, a lake and a sandwich shop, of course.

This past long week-end, Eve and I did not go camping. By which I mean we went, sort of, not-camping. By which I mean the three other families we traveled to the east coast with last summer made reservations ages ago to go camping at Sandbanks Provincial Park for a week including the long week-end and asked us if we wanted to go to make it a WAWA reunion (our four last names). Whereupon I laughed until I fell over and bumped my elbow and said 'ow', then sat up and said 'oh, pardon me, you were serious?', then said 'yeah, sorry, I don't camp. If there's a nuclear holocaust that results in the complete destruction of civilization and we all have to take to the forest and forage for food and dig toilet pits and make paper out of tree bark and crap like that, then maybe I will consider camping, as a possible alternative to death. Maybe.' But in keeping with our 'two single-parents in the same household' summer (see: goddamned baseball) I thoug...

Today I will tell you about my friend Zarah. Zarah is not only one of my best friends - she is quite possibly THE best friend. In the world. Ever. The best listener, the best conversationalist, the best constructive criticizer, the best comfort-giver and complimenter. We met in university. One could argue quite persuasively that had we not become friends in university, I would not have dated and married my husband, who lived in her student house, and I would not have my two splendid and incomparable children. We could stop there and I would already have reason for endless gratitude. But there's so much more. Zarah has an incredible ability to say the precisely right thing at the precisely right time. I've been on and off antidepressants since right after grad school; I would sink into a crippling depression, take medication, feel better, then try to kick the antidepressants because somehow it seemed okay to take them as a temporary aid but not okay to need them for the...