Month: August 2012

Peas, Ice Cream, Smarties and a Little Blue Potty

Hey, while Grandma’s trying to catch her breath – I’m writing this on her iPhone to let you know what’s going on here, Mommy, but first I have to shout at Grandma, “No, No!” because there is a tiny piece of blueberry stem in my breakfast and she will come remove it from my presence.  You know how I hate anything nasty like that cluttering up my highchair tray.  I’ll digress, Mommy, to tell you I have Grandpa trained, too.  Yesterday he found out some other grandfather has his grandson call him ‘Bronco’, so decided he wanted to be called ‘Cool Guy’.  I say it and he’ll watch the ‘puppy’ movie with me another fantastic time. Image
So the morning I found you’d left me, your two-year-old sweet baby girl, to go reclaim your misspent youth at that music festival for what?  Five sleeps? –  I was fine, really.  I had my cousin to hang with and the other Nana and Papa before I got plopped in the car with this Grandma and caught up with some zzz’s all the way to the city.  Grandma’s first stop was Toy R Us – what’s with you never taking me there?  I think she was nervous when she saw my eyes bug out – she bought another potty and had me packed out of there in no time and over to Great Grandma’s (GG’s) and Great Grandpa’s so I could amaze them with my dexterity and climbing abilities and they could say over and over, “I’m just afraid she’s going to fall,” and encourage me to eat my dinner.   Grandma didn’t want to let on that when I started to squawk the last twenty minutes of the three hour car ride (I mean really) she had passed me back a big old bag of potato chips and ruined my dinner.

The first night was hell going to bed without you folks.  I started to cry – like seriously wail, and you won’t believe this Mommy, but somehow Grandma had left ‘Baby’ behind.  Her and Grandpa started dragging other ratty old dolls up from their basement but Mom, Baby is Baby, no substitute was filling that void.  But then ‘Cool Guy’ offered a movie and Grandma remembered you’d pulled the plug on my viewing ‘Bolt’ for the summer – the flick that I cleverly refer to as ‘puppy movie’ to help you all forget that the action packed animation is scary and that amazing puppy, Bolt, demolishes a ton of bad dudes.   Well, that was the old folks solution to my frantic tears.  Grandpa found it on his big screen TV.  It was bliss Mommy, cuddling with them and watching puppy movie.  Grandpa was such a fan of it that the next morning while Grandma ran out to buy me a big bucket of fat baby Lego and stock the fridge with my favourite healthy fruits and juices (like that lasted) Cool Guy and I watched puppy movie again.
Grandma’s been showing me off to her friends.  It’s a pretty easy gig – she get’s me to say a few words that come out clearly, and you know, I show them that I know where my nose is (duh)  and they are down on the blanket doing baby Lego with me or asking Grandma in a challenging way if she’s spoiling me with ice cream – and then she does. She had invited two grandma wanna-be’s-but-not-too-soon over passed my erratic bedtime and I know they were looking at us like the whole situation was out of control.  But really, Mommy, it was late and I was bored with the fat Lego.  She didn’t want me to watch puppy movie again (Cool Guy wasn’t home yet), they’d kiboshed my attempt at grabbing that glass ball dangling over the window seat (who makes a ball out of glass anyway), and I was so over toys.  Someone came up with the ice cream idea and yeah, yeah, I know I’m supposed to say “all done” instead of mucking in it and pushing the dish off the tray, but honestly I was spent, and Grandma was frazzled.  I knew if she’d just put me in the bath I could amuse her again.
Speaking of amusing people – the other great-grandparents came to see moi and were spellbound by my using Cool Guy’s iPad – iPad, iphone – it’s not rocket science – you scroll, you push, you tap – a baby could do it.  Even more exciting – as time goes by Grandma lets me get into the cupboards she’s said no to earlier – so why wouldn’t I give that a go?  Isn’t that what they’ll want from me when I’m older – persistence – going the extra mile?  So finally I got to play with the glass candle holders and the fragile Easter decorations tucked away behind them.

Did I mention that people bring me presents – a new doll – so cute, but not Baby.  Speaking of Baby – what’s this I keep hearing, something along the lines of, “do I understand about the new baby?”  Seriously folks?  Word here is that I’m too little to stress about a new sibling yet.  Oh, and speaking of stress…  Grandma gave up on the potty thing.  Hey, don’t get me wrong.  I like this new potty.  She thought the other one wasn’t comfy. This one is so comfy and supposedly my using it for my business instead of perfectly acceptable diapers could have something to do with eating Smarties.Image  Hey, I can’t believe you’ve kept those from me too.  I guess we’re even – you’re having a wild time at the music festival with Daddy and I’m kicking it up here with those chocolate bits of loveliness.  It seems Grandma thought she could train me, but she handed over the Smarties when I whimpered at bedtime and she sort of whimpered herself about how she trained her four kids – you can train me, and good luck to you.  I think it was a weak moment.

Today she took me out to visit another sweet grandma wanna-be… for more presents and you know it – ice cream.  Grandma was super late getting there and I have to tell you, Grandma told this friend that she can’t believe she suggested to you, Mommy, that maybe you could do some of your art while I sleep.  “As if!” she said to her ice cream serving friend.  “I totally get that when this toddling ball of energy stops spinning circles all you want to do is catch your breath, or clean up the mess, or maybe for fun throw in the laundry and watch it go around,” Grandma said gulping back a glass of vino.
ImageShe brought me home and for dinner she let me pick and eat a zillion peas from what she calls her slug invested garden.   After that I tried once more to stand at the top of the stairs to the lower level and shout what Daddy shouts at you when we’re all here together, “Zoe, are you coming?”  Just hoping that you might be down there.  That really got to the old folks – Grandma hugged me and told me “just two more sleeps” and Cool Guy said he’d watch puppy movie. They were both asleep before Bolt returned from his exile.

You two have fun – we are. But it will be blissful to snuggle with you and see ‘Baby’ again and get off this ice cream diet.  Love you guys.  XO Tessa (Grandma says I need an alias in case this is all too embarrassing later.

We Are Light

I wrote a blog about moving my youngest daughter to Montreal, a very short time ago.  But maybe I was sleeping under a tree like Rumpelstiltskin because it appears that four years have gone by since I left her standing on the corner of St. Catherines and Rue Guy in front of Concordia University.

During that time she spend two years in one teeny studio apartment on De Maisonneuve Boulevard, did a year’s exchange at foggy San Francisco State University discovering that American’s are not, as she naively thought, very similar to Canadians, and a fourth year in an even smaller, though considerably newer apartment on Cote de Neiges looking far across at the Pont Champlain Bridge. Along with her studies she did two internships at popular youth culture magazines (the shamefully popular completely unpaid for internship).

I flew to Montreal with the whispers of approaching summer to help my daughter pack up and return to the west.  Waking up in her studio on Cote de Neiges, with the sun deceptively warming the apartment through the window, I contemplated the basics of setting up and dismantling the belongings to support a happy, satisfied life.  This subject is so much on my mind these days because of my own efforts at (here’s that tired old word again) – ‘decluttering’, as well as my exertions to help my parents rid themselves of some of what my mom feels would lighten her load.  It had been a cool, even cold last bit of April, while we closed off this part of the life my daughter had in Quebec – during which she obtained her degree and blossomed from an eighteen-year-old girl, who I warned about street dangers and trusting strangers, to a twenty-two-year-old woman, who warned me as she left to say goodbye to friends, that she would return late and to just lock the door behind her.Image

I took careful notes when we first set up Lilly’s apartment, arriving on a red-eye flight from Calgary and driving a rental car directly to the Ikea in the suburbs.  There we purchased the twelve dollar lamp and twenty-nine dollar desk, and the one hundred and twenty-nine dollar bed frame, along with two equally cheap stools to sit at the tiny counter in the galley kitchen-ish area, and one TV type table if she chose to eat on the half- a- couch and ottoman we found at Sears, while she watched a downloaded show on her computer (students don’t have TVs or land lines anymore.)   And every summer and Christmas break we warned Lily about bringing too much back to Montreal from home, but still she accumulated a series of heavy coats trying to deal with the Quebec cold, the gift of the rice cooker, half a dozen pairs of stylish but hopefully warm enough boots, a tray of candles for the ambiance of warmth, two fans for the oppressive heat in the beginning and sometimes end of the term, a small library of books from her classes, portfolios full of edgy photographs from her Fine Art photography degree, as well of course, the cameras and equipment she didn’t start out with.

We had already packed and delivered to Greyhound Express three large plastic containers of the heavy items – books and boots and some dishes she was fond of, as well as her record player and records. Did I mention she had convinced us to purchase an actual record player here as a birthday gift and I could never dissuade her from adding to her load of Montreal possessions by carting Led Zeplin, Fleetwood Mac and Three Dog Night records from our basement collection every trip she took home to Alberta.  Her posters, and collection of necklaces hanging on pin and LED flashing Virgin Mary light had been taken from the walls, we’d burned the candles down, the stools and little table and one chair sold on Craigslist, two book stands given away to an apartment neighbor, friends had come to claim some of the most intriguing prints, along with the most utilitarian warm clothes Lily was ready to part with, and her lonely cactus and one scraggly hanging plant.  The guy she found to sublet for the remaining of the lease, got a steal of a deal on her bed and mattress and will never understand how she will miss her little half-a-couch.Image  Lily directed me to leave him the never used cake pans and muffin tins, saying, “See Mom, I told you four years ago I wasn’t going to become a baker.”  True, in four years she became a accomplished rice cooker, but never a baker. Today we will eat out – having done a far better job of diminishing the contents of her refrigerator than the contents of her apartment that we will still have to show up with at the airline counter tomorrow.  I’ve explained my strategy to Lily’s dad over the phone.  Flying West-jet, each of our first enormous suitcases is complimentary, the second they will charge us twenty dollars for. Of course, then we will still have purses cleverly tucked into overstuffed backpacks, and carry on computer cases, probably with the last used towels falling out of them, along with a tube of rolled up prints and a flat package of the prints too precious to release to a week of travel on the Greyhound.

And if this is what she has lived with comfortably enough for four years what is it that I have filled my home with over a quarter of a decade?  What are the precious goods, the necessary tools, the carriers of memory, and even the flotsam and jetsam, that surrounds me that couldn’t be sold to a few anxious buyers on Craigslist, tossed off to neighbors, packed into three small boxes on Greyhound and carried on a flight?  Image

Preparing to call the last Montreal taxi driver that I would converse with in a long while, I realized that as minimalist as we’d been, we still had a fair load for flying purposes.  So, I decided, we must work at giving the appearance of lightness, of effortlessness –  at that airline counter where they weigh things up.  “Here we are, it is just her and me, and a few bags, nothing to get worried about, or charge us ridiculous amounts of money to bring.  It is just us,” my attitude will say,” see – we are ethereal.  We are light – so just us and a good part of the accumulations of a life of four years of growing up.  That’s all.  Just that.”