Best Friends

I love this video because it was taken about 5 minutes after we brought Zak home. You can tell right from the get go that these two are going to be best friends...I also like that you get a good sense of Toby's "bossy voice" which we are hearing more and more of these days!

Introducing...Zak Henry

It wasn’t long after Mia was born that Rob announced, “Well, now all we need is a dog!” I believe my response was ”over my dead body” but I can’t QUITE remember, as I was busy doing something like delivering the placenta or having my insides stitched up at the time. In fact, I had quite forgotten about his statement until a few months ago when he began to mention it. Again. And. Again.

Yes, that’s right – I bought my husband a dog for Fathers day. We have officially become a family of 5. This newest edition didn’t quite take the full 9 months - just a few intensive weeks of daily kijiji searching and we have found ourselves the perfect dog to join our family. His name is Zak.

Zak is a 3-year-old “Red Retriever”. I’m not completely sure such a thing ACTUALLY exists – he may just be a cross between a golden retriever and an Irish Setter. Either way, he is a beautiful auburn colour and is extremely friendly. He lived with a family with two young kids in Stayner on a big lot with no fence and is used to lots of land and young kids. He was in the car all of five minutes before he settled down to sleep and made it clear to us that he feels right at home.

Despite being bowled over a few times, Toby is already referring to Zak as “his dog” although it is quite clear that Rob is alpha dog. Mia giggles at the sloppy wet kisses she now receives on a regular basis, and I am reluctantly admitting that he is, indeed, the perfect addition to our family.

I am accepting nominations for wife of the year award, as the year 2011 will be forever remembered as the year in which I gave my husband a daughter AND a dog (while graciously accepting a frying pan as my mothers day present.)

Time Out Failure

Tonight after dinner I was helping Toby to wash his hands and face when he started spitting on me. I explained to him that spitting was rude and asked him to stop. He didn’t. I asked him again. He continued to spit. I threatened a time out and counted to three. He waited until I had gotten to three and then ever so sweetly smiled up at me and spat in my face.

I had no choice but to calmly and firmly escort my soap-covered-spitting-three-year-old to the time out chair. Following the rules of “time outs” I looked at the clock and prayed that the 3 minutes would go by quickly.

They didn’t.

My three year old’s response to time outs is akin to the stages of grief – he starts with anger; flailing his limbs about in dramatic protest until the denial set in and he boldy get off the time out chair and attempts to innocently end his sentence early. After a few failed attempts at “denial”, he finally resigns himself to acceptance, as he sits back down and sheds great big alligator tears to signify his grief.

It is a long 3 minutes for both of us.

Finally, I had made my three minute point. As I escorted him off the chair and walked back to the bathroom to continue washing his hands I asked him why he had been given a time out.

“Be-be-because…I was SPITTTING” he guffawed through the tears of his torture.

“And are you going to spit again?” I asked

“N-n-n-NOOOOO!!!” He wailed in conclusion.

Satisfied that he had learned his lesson, I picked up his facecloth and made a little game of the face washing by pretending I was a washing machine, making loud noises with my mouth and sweeping his face in circular motion.

The tears stopped abruptly and he started at me in disbelief.

I guess he didn’t realize I was being a washing machine. All he could focus on was the fact that, in doing so, I had spat all over his face.

The only thing better than diamonds...

Tonight as I was putting Toby to bed he noticed, for the first time, my engagement ring.

“Ooh…” he exclaimed, “That’s a pretty ring, Mommy!”

I took this opportunity to give my son his first lesson on the 4 C’s and explained to him that it was called a diamond and it was very special. He asked if he could try it on and I obliged but drew the line at letting him wear it “to sleep in”.

He was visibly distraught that he couldn’t wear my most expensive piece of jewelry to be bed, so I clarified to him WHY it was so special; it had been a special present from daddy, given to me a long time ago. At first he wondered if I had meant HIS daddy or MY daddy and I elaborated that it had been HIS daddy and that he had asked me to marry him (in a castle – one of Toby’s favourite stories) and I had said yes.

Toby thought about this for a minute and then decided to tell me a story of his own.

His story went like this :

“Mommy you know what? One day I asked Gochar to marry me on top of a castle and Gochar said YES! And then do you know what I gave him?”

I waited with baited breath for what I thought was the surefire answer.

As usual, I was wrong.

“Chocolate milk!”

I supose that when you’re three, chocolate milk is right up there with diamond rings.

Maternal Pride

Mia has a new trick.

And not only am I thrilled to see that my baby girl CAN learn new things and has the potential to grow into a rational, logistically thinking individual, I also have a touch of that irrational mummy brain excitement going on. Thank heavens it is happening again!

Before Mia was born I was reliving Toby’s baby days through the countless videos I took. Looking back on them I was APPALLED at my high pitched voice and the shrill edge of lunacy as I pointed out to the camera his seemingly groundbreaking discoveries; holding his head up (lasting all of 5 seconds before it violently slammed against my breast) and reaching for a rattle (after an agonizing 5 minutes of anticipation with shaky amateur camera work) and saying the word “blueberry” in what I thought was completely coherent adult word. (It came out as “Ba-Ba”) Now that Toby comes home from daycare proudly announcing that he can say the days of the week in French, or recite the importance of Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, I wondered how I would ever be able to meet Mia’s first accomplishments with the same exhilaration as I once did with her big brother.

Well, not to worry – I can. And once again, it came quite naturally.

Today she woke up from her nap SPITTING at me. At first I was taken aback. She wouldn’t even breastfeed she was SO excited about her new ability to spit. After a good 10 minutes of this she FINALLY showed me what she had been working at during her morning nap; Mia blew her first raspberry.

The look of elation on her face was nothing compared to the whoop of joy and hand clapping praise I showered her with.

My baby girl can (sort of) blow a raspberry. And once again I’m a (slightly crazy) proud mama.

But not to worry- - I have learned SOMETHING from my experience with my first-born. This time, to save myself from future embarrassment, I DIDN’T take a video.

Population Explosion at Brewster Lake. Or not.

I have mentioned before that we live in the middle of nowhere; I have to admit that I have a love/hate relationship with my house. Some days after the kids are in bed, I sit on the swing and listen to the crickets chirping while the sun sets as the waterfall Rob built trickles in the background and I can’t imagine a more serene location. Other days I would give anything to live in town so I could walk somewhere. Or take a taxi home. Or ride my bike to work. Or get a coffee from the Espresso post on Sunday morning. Or order a pizza for delivery.

One day I hope to have the best of both worlds…but for now I will continue to use my rapid cycling rollercoaster of emotion about my house as good material for my blog J

Sometimes there are moments, even when the crickets are chirping and the waterfall is flowing that I am reminded of our isolation. Yesterday held one such moment. Toby was sitting staring out the front window when all of a sudden he excitedly pointed out to me, “MOMMMY! Look at all of those PEOPLE over there!!!”

Naturally, when you are used to a population of zero out of your front window, an impending swarm of thousands brought me running.

To my disappointment, I was not greeted with my brain’s anticipatory delusion. There was, in fact, nobody on the road save the few trees that are usually there. But off in the distance I could see what Toby thought was a mirage of socialization: our neighbors clothes line and their brightly coloured laundry. It did kind of look like a line of lots of people.

Sigh. Back to the crickets.

Environmental Complications

Tonight, as we entered the bathroom to wash our hands after supper, Toby threw open the bathroom door and proudly announced that he had left the lights on (from the before supper handwashing session) so we didn’t have to bother turning them on again!

“Isn’t that a good idea?” he asked, his little chest swelling with pride at his ingenious foresight.

Hmm…did I get into the pros and cons of electrical preservation with my 3 year old? I decided to give it a go,

“Well…” I said slowly, “Leaving lights on all of the time uses up electricity which is bad for the environment.”

Deflated, Toby stared at me for a second, blinked twice and then, with a shrug of his shoulder and a loud sigh concluded,

“Huh. Well…I don’t know that yet.”

And then he happily set about washing his hands.

I can see his point; sometimes a little extra knowledge just complicates things.

Telephone Manners

After 10 years (TEN YEARS!) I have finally managed to convince Rob to concede on a point he has been adamantly opposed to for eons. Today, FINALLY, Rob agreed to put his morals and sound ethics aside and allow me to get ... call display.

It may seem like a petty dispute. Believe me, it is not. As my husband is pushed to join the 21^st century and leave the 80’s behind, I have (ever the supportive wife) had to do a lot of reassuring that call display is now the NORMAL thing to have; it is NOT rude and it WILL make my life with two kids MUCH more convenient.

He is skeptical, but I took his (albeit weak) go ahead sign without hesitation and called Bell Canada.

After the cheerful robot, I got a lovely chap with a thick Indian accent who very CLEARLY knows about as much about the North American telephone system as my dad knows about the internet: not a heck of a lot.

After I answered all of the topnotch special secret service detective questions to reassure them that I was in fact the rightful owner of my phone line I was allowed to request a change to my phone settings. (Phew.) (There is a special place in hell for whatever criminals duped Bell Canada and forced them to adopt such strict telephone identity security systems ... but that’s another post …)

“Yes, Hello, Mrs Alyssa Boyd-Henry!”

“Hello” (our phone bill is the only thing that I use the name Henry for)

“May I call you Mrs. Alyssa Boyd-Henry?”

(Good God this was going to take all day)

“Yes.”

Right away, Mr Cheerful from Bangladesh informed me that there was some good news! It turns out by calling to add call display to my existing phone line I would end up SAVING myself some money! All I had to do was sign up for the Bell Convenience 5 Feature Pack and my phone bill would plummet from $71.71 to $71.53.

!!!!

I may have postpartum brain fog but even I could figure out that it adds up to a reduction of NOT EVEN TWENTY CENTS!

It seemed to excite my interlocutor very much. (I suspect he knows as much about our currency as he does about Bell Canada…)

The problem became the 5 features I had to choose from. Dude on the phone read them out to me from a list. When I asked him to clarify just exactly WHAT would happen when I pressed *11 for the mysterious “call privacy identification “ he became slightly anxious and then reread to me the previous sentence,

“well…you press *11 and then the privacy identification is activated. “

Fantastic.

None of the proffered other features were in any way appealing, and I certainly didn’t want to rock the boat by adding lots of POTENTIALLY RUDE bells and whistles to our phone line. Call waiting just might have the potential to get Rob kicked out of the Catholic Church. You never know….

Finally, in a state of impatient exasperation (the kind that only strikes when you are on the phone with Bell Canada for the 20^th minute trying to accomplish a SIMPLE TASK with someone halfway around the world) I said to the guy,

“Look. It has taken TEN YEARS for my husband to agree to Call Display. (TEN YEARS!) If I start adding all these other fancy things to my phone line and the phone starts beeping the next time he’s on the phone with his mother he’s going to take 10 steps backwards and time warp our house back to the 1950s and I’ll be using a beige rotary phone that’s attached to the wall. ALL I WANT IS CALL DISPLAY!”

This stunned him. I could hear him scrambling for the right words as he leafed through the papers on his desk. This was putting his training to the test. He may not know about the special intricacies of the *11 features of North American phones but this man had social skills. After a short break I heard him take a deep breath and as politely as he could muster asked,

“Ah yes…uh…Mrs Alyssa Boyd-Henry I forgot to ask you…How are YOU today?”

Believe it or not, his technique worked. I told him I was fine and together we navigated through the complexities of the Bell Canada 5 feature convenience pack. When it came time to process the changes I was very politely put on hold and quite diligently checked on and reassured every minute or so with profuse apologies about the wait. One time he even asked me how the weather was.

At the end of the day I am pleased to say our phone line has been successfully (and perilously) modernized and I not only made a new friend from halfway around the world, but also learned a valuable lesson in politeness.