Thankful…

This weekend posed such a dichotomy in my heart that I need to blog about it just to make some sense of it...

Friday afternoon we headed back to our old stomping ground; Thunder Bay. It was a reunion. It was a homecoming. It was a wedding. And it was over in the blink of an eye.

There is something about coming home to Thunder Bay that makes me feel jubilant and yet so settled; every time we go back it is as if we have never left. The conversations with friends pick up without missing a beat and there is a comfort and ease to our visits that is so refreshing. And the town itself - with its rugged beauty and quiet modesty; I am always so proud to say I once lived there.

Rob and I lived in Thunder Bay for 3 years. It was the town we moved to together and shared our first home in. During those 3 years we shared the ups and downs of residency, being away from family and friends back home, wedding planning and job hunting. It was in Thunder Bay that Rob and I became a family.

Our life in Collingwood is everything we want. With the ski hills and the Bruce trail it has the beauty and activities of Thunder Bay without the 17hour commute to family. We have both found our dream jobs and we have a community of friends we couldn’t live without.

And we have Toby.

At the wedding I reconnected with friends I haven’t seen since medical school and residency. I gushed to them in my usual superlative ways about Toby and life in Collingwood. (I even carried my iPhone with me to provide video evidence of my crazy son…yes, I WAS that mom…) And yet as we left Thunder Bay on Sunday morning, well rested, fed and sauna-ed and my voice HOARSE from talking, I felt a strange sadness come over me.

Wouldn’t life be so much easier if you got married and worked in the town you grew up in? Then you’d never have to MISS all of the other places you’ve grown accustomed to, and you’d never find yourself trying to decipher the strange contented sadness that lingers after what should have been a purely EXCITING weekend away.

I know deep down that I am lucky to feel this way; to know there are numerous places in the world I can call home and feel just as comfortable in as my own. It reminds me of a quote I used in my highschool graduation blurb,

“How lucky we are to have loved something so much that saying goodbye could be so hard…”

Thanks for a great weekend, Thunder Bay. We’ll be home again, soon.

Cow Gazing

Just your regular rainy Saturday afternoon here. We were all going a little stir crazy being in the house all weekend, soToby and I decided to take a road trip to Singhampton to get the Globe and some Sherry (for the soup Rob is making...) and on the way home I casually decided to take a back road detour to see if we could find any cows.

Why, you ask? Do I ALWAYS go looking for cows? Well, no, not USUSALLY…until about a week ago after we took Toby to the Great Northern Exhibition and we spent (what felt like) HOURS gawking at the cows. They are now officially his FAVOURITE animals and EVERY TIME we get in the car he asks, “cows? COWS?” And USUALLY, no, we’re NOT going to see cows. So today I thought, “Why not? Lets go find some cows.”

I am happy to report that the cows on Concession 8 were out in full force despite the rain. And they were up to all the usual exciting-things-that-cows-do, such as standing still, eating grass and mooing. JACKPOT.

Toby INSISTED that we get out of the car to see them and so we did. In the rain. He then questioned WHY we were not sitting DOWN to see the cows (as we had done at the exhibition). After I’d convinced him that standing on the side of the deserted road in the pouring rain was good enough, he proceeded to watch. And watch. And watch. After 10 minutes of WATCHING (in the rain) I made the offhand suggestion (SUGGESTION) that MAYBE we leave....BIG mistake.

And so we kept watching. Because the only thing that makes cow-watching-in-the-rain-on-concession-8 WORSE is to do it while trying to hold down a temper tantruming 19 month old.

And so the cow watching continued with such exciting moments as the mommy cow peeing and one of the baby cows mooing. And, occasionally, they would walk a few steps to find more grass.

Fascinating.

I was 5 seconds away from getting the cooking Sherry out of the car when Finally – FINALLY – my silently-mesmerized boy opened his mouth to point out, “Cows….Hat? Shoes?”

What? SERIOUSLY? We stand out here in the RAIN on Concession 8 watching COWS for 30 minutes and all you can come up with is HAT? SHOES?

But then I got it…and it was indeed a good question…why IS it that this particular species is allowed out in the rain WITHOUT their hat and shoes on? Everyone ELSE has to wear them!

As we chatted about why cows don’t wear hats and shoes EVEN in the rain, we made our way over to the car and I was FINALLY allowed to leave. As I got him into the car seat Toby was still straining to get one last glimpse of his mirage of cows and I said, “Say bye-bye to the cows!” Two minutes later I heard his first 5 syllable sentence; “Bye bye to the cows!”

I guess it was an enjoyable outing afterwards. And I didn’t even have to crack the sherry.

THe Name Change

You may have noticed that the object of Toby’s affection’s name has suddenly changed. That’s because I have found this child/predicament WAAAAAY too entertaining to omit from Toby’s blog. I also have an uber-practical husband who ruthlessly pointed out to me, after reading my last “un-edited” blog entry, that, although it was funny, I would probably be pillaged, sued and burned at the stake for using the REAL NAME of this unsuspecting 2.5 year old in such an oh-so public (that’s referring to all 5 of you who read my blog) venue.

I hereby Christen you, love-of-my-19-month-old’s-life-and-crazy-day-care-chick-who-likes-to-eat-markers : LAYLA.

Layla

After much anticipation and a great deal of build up I finally met Layla today.

We walked into daycare and as all of the other 18 month olds rebounded into the arms of their parents in heartbreaking-I-had-such-a-great-weekend-I-don’t-want-it-to-be-Monday-already-please-don’t-leave-me sobs, Toby leaped into the room and bounced over to meet a little girl whom he IMMEDIATELY introduced to me as Layla.

“Layla! Mommy - -Lay-LA!” he repeated with his finger about a millimeter from her face. The kid is NOT subtle.

As any good mother would do when meeting the love of their son’s life, I knelt down and smiled at my competition.

“Hello! Is your name Layla?” I asked sweetly.

She said nothing, so again, I asked,

“What’s YOUR name?”

Not. Even. A. Smile.

Oh come ON, kid. Have your parents taught you NOTHING about INLAWS?

I’d like to give this little girl the benefit of the doubt – but not only was she NOT blonde (she was brunette), but she had NONE of the attributes I had imagined would be required by my golden boy’s standards; smile included. And I don’t know if I’d say she’s 3. More like 2 and a half.

My skepticism about this Layla chick were even further reinforced as we left daycare today, my exhausted son trailing behind me as I tried to ignore his lamenting sadness about leaving “Laaaayyyyylaaa…”. On our way out we happened to run into one of the other daycare workers and I explained (in case she found his incessant Layla-ing creepy) that he “talks about Layla a lot”.

She snorted and chuckled and then with a wink said, “I’m not surprised!”

Good gracious, and here I was worried about him catching swine flu at daycare- - now here we are facing an even more potentially disastrous predicament; Layla….

How to get Daddy's attention

Rob went downstairs this morning to get something from the basement. Toby quickly ran to the top of the stairs and very sweetly called down for him,

“Daaaa-daaa!...”

he paused a few seconds before trying again,

“Daaaa-dddyyyyyy!….”

Finally he’d had enough of not getting a response and in as loud a voice he could muster yelled down the stairs,

“ROOOOOOOB!!!!!!!!”

He knows how to get our attention.

The Other Woman..

I’ve been replaced.

Before this morning, there were only 5 people in the world that Toby would mention without provocation from us ; Mommy, Daddy, Gaga, Bapa, and Wee wee. He will repeat people’s names to us if we ask about them - - but doesn’t usually INITIATE conversation about them…that is, until this morning when he woke up and immediately asked for “LAYLA"

LAYLA?!!?!

I ignored his request the first time thinking he must have wanted a book or something strange for breakfast, but still he persisted. Finally, I clued into the fact that Lola was someone at daycare. (Or some THING as we have learned after the Bag-bat incident…) I tried other words that started with L like Lunch or Laura…nope, it was only LAYLA he wanted, or “Leeeeeeeyyy-Lah!” as he would say it in his soft, dreamy eyed, long drawn out way…

So when I dropped him off this morning I casually asked Nicole (his new daycare mom) if they happened to have a Leyla at their daycare.

It seems they do. Not only is her name Layla, but, according to Nicole, she is VERY cute, blonde and "Quite a bit older" than him. (I think she’s 3)

So there you have it; only three weeks in and already I’ve been usurped by a hot broad named Layla.

National Punctuation Day!

Today is National Punctuation Day. They have a day for EVERYTHING! But this is definitely a GOOD one….

There’s an article on page A19 of The Star that MAY have been written by a long lost Robinson relative of ours…based SOLELY on our similarly dramatic reaction to misplaced apostrophes that can ONLY be explained either by genetics or a close proximity to my mother. In his article he references a website Apostropheabuse.com. As someone who has been INFUSED with the HORRORS of bad grammar my entire life, just perusing the signs on the website made me cringe. And the more I saw the more visceral the reaction – something parallel to what dogs must sense when children release balloons in slow agonizingly high pitched squeaks of rubber on rubber air leakage….

I know, I know, I shouldn’t point the finger. You are all well aware of my own grammatical deficiencies - in particular, the confusion over its vs it’s. For some reason, my apostrophe alarm neglects all words that start with “it”. BELIEVE ME, it is not something that passes through my mother’s grammatical security system unnoticed. In fact, sometimes I throw in the odd misspelled “its” just to make sure she’s still alive and reading my blog.

So maybe I’m not one to talk. But I think that Punctuation Day is a fine way for the grammatical neurotics (or the unfortunate children of such) to channel their energy in more constructive way’s.

(I did that on purpose – if you didn’t catch it, please check out www.apostropheabuse.com if you STILL don’t get it…well, perhaps a date with my mother is in order?)