Tag: family life

Sunset Ceremony: Life in Ottawa

~ Veronique ~ Leave a comment

I mentioned in a previous post that the heroism in raising a large family is not always the endless march of chores (although it is relentless) but the ability to stop, breathe and do anything else than laundry, cooking and cleaning. When the children were younger… Let me rephrase that… When my older children were younger and we only had 4, we would go for hikes in the Gatineau Park, attend free family events in the Capital, visit museums, organize camping trips and get-togethers with friends. Since the fifth child, and even more since the sixth, we stopped doing anything but driving, cooking, cleaning… and oh, moving a few times too.

This week, my oldest daughter asked if we could attend the Sunset Ceremony at the RCMP musical ride headquarters. Once a year, the RCMP Musical Ride puts on a free show in Ottawa before leaving on their summer tour. Attending requires some wit as parking is limited and the best seats go quickly. We prefer to park at the Aviation Museum and walk 15 minutes (adult pace). Ideally, we would bring lawn chairs and a picnic and camp there no later than 6:00-6:30. The show ends at sunset with the lowering of the Canadian flag. It’s a great opportunity to celebrate Canadian culture and heritage and to teach the children about flag etiquette (because you know… more culture is better than less.) “Yes, every flag has to be lowered at sunset and put away.” “Yes, even the flag hanging off the neighbour’s front porch…”

This year, we were treated to a performance by the Canadian Sky Hawks, complete with wind change and crowd landing. I ended-up under a Sky Hawk parachute on Canada Day as a child. Memories… Now I watch the size of their boots and the speed of their descent and shudder.That being said, I was giddy as a little girl this week as we waited for the Hercules to drop its high performing cargo. I told my daughter: “There’s a fascinating mix of anal retentiveness and recklessness: they have to be obsessive about their kits and jump drills, yet they jump off a plane and do unnatural stunts with a parachute.” I could never take that step off the Hercules.

Day trip (Or why good baby carriers and large families rock)

~ Veronique ~ Leave a comment

As you may have noticed, the move and consecutive adaptation-reorganization have punched a significant hole in my ability to blog. Not only time is at a premium but I am mentally and physically exhausted and  unable to string two coherent ideas together. I have posts started on attachment parenting twins, the twins’ 9 month update, the twins’ birth story, an update on the running diaries about setbacks (ha!) but I’m unable to finish them. So until my brain returns, here is another lazy picture post.

3 carriers: Ergo, BabyHawk Mei Tai and Boba 3G

This month we are experimenting with different infant/child carriers. With 3 under 3 at home during the day (and with me to run errands), I am definitely short a few hands. Pushing a bulky double stroller just adds to my misery and I started carrying the twins in two baby carriers, one at the front and one at the back. We went on a countryside stroll this Father’s Day and left the stroller in the van. In this picture (above), Clara is carrying Lucas in an Ergo baby carrier, Eloise is carrying Eve in a BabyHawk Mai Tei and I have Sarah in a Boba 3G.

Boba up and down

The Boba 3G was a loaner from a local breastfeeding and babywearing store. Go give Milkface some love: they are awesome. The carrier goes on and off easily and is the best I found for carrying a squirmy preschooler. My daughter is 35 lbs and fits in the Boba like a dream thanks to a high back, wide body and handy foot stirrups.

Carrying a 35 lbs preschooler in a back carrier may seem like overkill…

… but bear with me: it makes my life a lot easier. She is near me, under control, and will stay in the carrier a lot longer than the stroller. When it’s time to walk, she goes up and down easily. I thought it would also be a good workout but the excellent design and weight distribution in the Boba 3G makes it feel like a whimpy daypack…

BabyHawk Mei Tai: best for my petite 12-year-old. She comfortably carried her 18 lbs sister for 30 minutes before she got too heavy.

The children love carrying their baby siblings in carriers. And I love the help!

Adventurers in the pine forest
For younger babies in a back carry, I prefer the smaller-bodied Ergo.

Everyone agrees with me yet that big families and good carriers rock?

Fathers Day shot: that’s some heavy lifting!
We had lunch in the beautiful village of Almonte
And topped it all off with ice cream

My husband is a rock star

~ Veronique ~ 4 Comments

Not a real rock star, of course. But he rocks more than the other husbands and that makes him a rock star. Photo credit to my two oldest (and apparently talented) children, who are not supposed to touch the D90 under pain of death. You are so busted.

12-ish years ago, we bought a canoe at Canadian Tire. We used it a couple of times to go camping. In fact, my last memory of using the canoe was at Silver Lake. I peed on a stick that morning and found out we were expecting Marie. My last memory of the canoe is therefore tinged with morning sickness. With 4 then 5 children, activities like camping took a sabbatical and the canoe sat — or rather lied — unused in three consecutive backyards. Until now.

The pond
Tall grass

When the children saw the pond behind our rental house they immediately thought of great canoeing adventures. When their dad asked where he should set-up the trampoline in the backyard, David’s answer was immediate:

On the island! This way it will be double the fun!

Trampo-freaks entertaining the neighbourhood
Trampoline Island

(it has not occurred to my little country bumpkin that the patch of grass behind our patio door is our only backyard. The pond belongs to the Crown according to the developer and the developer according to the City.)

Cloudscape
Plane

Last weekend, my husband took the children for a turn in the canoe. The pond is a rainwater catchment area landscaped to serve as a recreational path and  bird sanctuary. The children returned from their expedition with tales of seeing Aaron-the-Heron (and his partner-in-majestic-flight Erin-the-Heron) up real close and meeting a little water mammal in the cracks of the man-made retaining wall. My husband was proud to be fit enough to portage his vehicle to and from the pond. I never had any doubts.

Our teenage daughter and son ran around the pond taking pictures of the expedition laughing as they heard kids yelling from their backyards: “They have a CANOE!!” Meanwhile I could just imagine the exasperated look on their parents’ faces. “Two years doing just fine telling the kids we weren’t allowed on the pond, and they move with their 8 kids and A CANOE… There goes the neighbourhood!”

Since September we have not taken nearly enough time to pause and spend time doing something cool with the children. This little expedition around our suburban paradise reminded me just how simple building memories can be. In a large family, all too often the heroism is not in the endless march of chores but in being able to stop long enough to do something else.

Random Bullets

~ Veronique ~ 1 Comment

  • My apologies for the light blogging. A perfect storm of moving, listing our house, moving, medical appointments, moving, sick baby, sick baby, moving, sleepless nights, napless days and more moving has severely curtailed my ability to do anything but moving and holding babies.
  • In the last couple of weeks, the twins turned 8 months, got sick and then better. One twin is on a cocktail of 4 different drugs and things — fingers crossed — seem to be settling. And by “settling” I mean that this baby is no longer crying for 2 to 4 hours for no apparent reason in the middle of the night, twice a night, night after night. Dealing with a child with a chronic condition, albeit mild and probably recoverable, has given me a new bone-deep appreciation for parents of severely ill children. It is relentless.
  • Many friends and members of my family have ganged-up to give me a hand moving and looking after the children. This in turn has given me a new, bone-deep appreciation for the value of community. Some have helped me pack boxes, others have helped me prep our house for showings, others — with a medical degree — have decided that enough was enough and we shall get to the bottom of this with the babies. Some people wonder how I do it with a large family. This is how. I don’t do it, we do it. There is nothing miraculous about having a large family when you have as much support as I do. To my most awesome family and friends Cheers! (and a heartfelt thank you.) You can see how well the house shows in the gallery below. I hope to have good selling news soon!
  • When we listed our house, our agent asked that we leave our kitchen table in the kitchen to make it look more kitchen-y. As a result we are eating off these two very ugly 6-ft tables. You’d think I would be looking forward to selling our house so we can get on with the business of paying off our debts, living cash-flow positive and start looking for land on which to build our forever home. But really, I just want to sell so I can get my kitchen table back.

I haven’t worked a day in my life

~ Veronique ~ 5 Comments

Yesterday I received a call from someone at Sun News Network asking if I would give a short interview on why being a stay-at-home mom is hard work. It was to be in response to some comment made by someone about Ann Romney, the wife of Republican leadership hopeful Mitt Romney. Ann Romney stayed home to raise her five sons and all she got was this lousy t-shirt saying “I haven’t worked a day in my life”… or at least, that’s what the Democrat woman who should not be thought, perceived or otherwise considered to be tied to Barack Obama’s reelection campaign said.

In the end, the interview did not happen. The producer decided to go with the “opposite point” which I think means a stay-at-home mom who will give an interview about how she hasn’t worked a day in her life. Or maybe a working mom who thinks she has it harder than Ann Romney. Fair enough.

I found that quite funny because I am, to most people, “the opposite point.” I am on maternity leave which makes me both a working mom and a stay-at-home mom. But even on a more stricter understanding, I have seen both sides of the work-home balance. To most, I am an odd animal. Too stay-at-home for the working crowd, too working mom for the stay-at-home crowd. In the Mommy Wars, I am foe to all (although I prefer to think of myself as friend to everyone).

That whole episode about whether stay-at-home moms do real work made me laugh because when you talk to women who prefer to work outside the home, they will usually say that they need to remain engaged, stimulated, they need the challenge of work to avoid turning to mush. I stayed at home for 10 years while having my first four children. Then I went back to law school to get a Master’s degree and went to work after graduating. Now I am on maternity leave with three little ones under 3. I’m not convinced that work is a challenge compared to raising children at home. As I wrote to a Facebook friend who commented on the issue:

I used to look forward to the end of my mat leave* so I could get (a) more money, and (b) a lunch break. I guess I must have missed something.

(* I’m not looking forward to the end of my mat leave, it was just for effect.)

All mothers work hard, whether they work at home with their little ones or outside the home. What is often missed by the critics of the working mom (aren’t we all?) is that the quantity of housework doesn’t decrease because mom works outside the home. The working mom, while she doesn’t suffer the minute-by-minute aggravation of dealing with young children, has the same mothering/homemaking requirements as the stay-at-home mom. She just has a lot less time to accomplish them. This is a hard-learned lesson from being a working mom and one I will gladly share with you.

When I decided to return to school, I did so because I wanted to hit the workplace. My law degree was dated and I was coming out of a pretty rough time personally. After 10 years at home with my children, a combination of factors and people in my life — most well-meaning, others not so — had led me to believe that I was a rather lousy mother. Not cut out for this. I went back to law school and I excelled. My husband stayed home for the first year of my studies and we found an amazing caregiver for the second year and onward. Including my graduate studies, I have been working outside the home for 6 years.

What I realized was that even with an amazing husband who pulls well above his weight around the house, the job of a mother changes very little despite the time spent out of the house. I still had to cook, and clean and make sure that homework was done and that laundry was cycled. And while my children were mostly fed, clothed and up-to-date in their schoolwork (minus a few close calls), once all the basic stuff was done I had very little energy left to be a good mom. A patient mom. An upbeat mom. A listening mom. An understanding mom.

Who has it worst? Being a good mom is hard work, period. Working mom or stay-at-home mom, we all have 24h in our days. Now that I am home full-time, I can do housework, cooking and cleaning while the children are at school, between the demands of my three little ones. Now that I am no longer trying to clean-up our act during the weekends when the children are coming and going, I have more flexibility to do unimaginable things with my kids, like taking nature walks or just chatting. Moreover, I’m not nearly as grouchy when they drag dirt in. So who has it harder? It depends how you fill your 24h. Being a good mom takes time, but I know people who can do in a day what I can hardly do in a week. Work obligations compresses the time available to raise raise children and generally running the home show. In that sense, working moms have a greater challenge than stay-at-home moms. On the other hand, if it wasn’t for stay-at-home moms, how many school activities would never happen? Working moms owe a debt of gratitude to their stay-at-home colleagues who make the school/neighborhood/community world go round.

It’s not how many hours we have, it’s how we fill them.

“Friendly message asking to keep toilet clean”

~ Veronique ~ 1 Comment

Believe it or not, someone came upon my blog while making a Google search on “friendly message asking to keep toilet clean”… No doubt because of my blogs on kids and chores. You can read it here.

As for the friendly message, the visitor to my blog has come and gone and probably won’t be back. But dirty toilets are a pet-peeve of mine. In fact, when people ask me what is my biggest challenge as a mother of young children they expect an answer like “the laundry”, “the groceries” or “remembering where I drove which child”. But really, my biggest challenge is public bathrooms, especially taking young children to public bathrooms. I. Hate. It. And God, knowing how much I always despised public bathrooms, “blessed” me with FIVE DAUGHTERS! Guys can just walk in a bathroom, unzip, empty their bladders touching nothing but their own private parts and walk away. But my husband can eat an entire restaurant meal without having to take anyone to a stinkin’ public bathroom. I was blessed with FIVE DAUGHTERS which means that I have visited just about every public bathroom in the Ottawa area and will continue to do so for another 10 years-ish. (Why 10 years? Because I don’t let my children go in public bathrooms alone. Yeah, I’m nuts, go read my post on Accidents.)

Someone overhearing me in the next stall would hear things like “don’t touch anything! No, no, don’t put your hands on the seat, put your hands on my knees and don’t touch anything. No you can’t flush, let me flush with my foot… Nooooo, don’t touch the door! Now let’s wash our hands… Don’t touch the soap dispenser, everybody who touches it has dirty hands (duh…). Don’t touch the taps, I’ll turn them on with my elbows. Just let me wash and dry your hands and run away from here. Noooo, don’t touch the door!! Here, have some Purell… more… more…” I don’t know if you can be friendly with people who leave their urine or sanitary products behind. I would just write:

What makes you think I want to sit in your urine?

Is that friendly enough? Because that’s what I wonder sometimes.

Random Bullets

~ Veronique ~ 3 Comments

  • It’s really nice when sports teams offer to pack your groceries at Superstore as a fundraiser, especially since the cashiers are not always helpful. But somebody should tell them not to pack heavy items on top of the bananas. Or the brie.
  • I must be Superwoman. I saw an ad for Canesten, the yeast infection treatment. It ends like this “… so when it’s your turn to do the carpool, you can!” Really? Who write these ads? Don Draper? Because let’s agree that a yeast infection is a real pain in the — ahem — ladyparts. But it’s not exactly an incapacitating condition.
  • Lucas’ pajamas — size 0-3 months — have anti-skid appliques at the bottom of the feet. Where do you think he’s going fast?

    Lucas, going places fast with anti-skid sleepwear!
  • Summer dresses are out in force on clothes racks and I love dresses. As I stroll through the shopping malls — well, more like the Joe Fresh aisle at Superstore — I have to keep reminding myself that summer dresses are totally inappropriate for nursing mothers. And once again this year I will give it a pass. Unless I decide to forgo my abhorrence to spend more than $49.99 on a piece of clothing and give this Boob dress a try (for $135… not gonna happen, but it was nice thinking about it!):
  • My children had a blast the other day when one asked:

Did you know that there are 200 fingers and toes in our family?

Big families are so cool!!

Friday’s Mixed Nuts

~ Veronique ~ Leave a comment

1 One motion in the House of Commons that promises to cause much hand wringing  is the motion presented by Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth. Woodworth proposes to review Section 223 of the Criminal Code that states that a child becomes a human being only once it proceeds, in a living state, from the body of its mother. Already, some commentators are raising the specter of “reopening the debate on abortion.” As a student of law and bioethics, I am always puzzled when people who are convinced to be on the right side of an issue refuse to debate it, especially when issues of life, death and the definition of humanity and personhood are at stake. It’s not like we didn’t get it wrong before, right Women and Black People?

2 Two Much Information, maybe… But did you know that nothing beats pink eye (conjunctivitis) like breast milk? And because breast milk is such an amazing element, you can squirt it directly in the baby’s eyes without the baby noticing anything? True story. It comes out at body temperature and the right pH. You can read more about the amazing antibacterial properties of breast milk here. When they say that breast milk is the best food for infants, what they mean is that nothing comes close. And when the can of formula  claims that it is “Our closest formula to breast milk” what it means is that nearly 100 years of nutrition research has yielded a formula that is as close to breast milk as a woman is close to a cow… Which may be closer than you think. Here is Amy Darroch, a young organic dairy farmer, talking to Chatelaine about her cows’ personalities:

Farming is so entertaining because of all the different characters in a herd. There are “boss cows” that are a little mean. Some drive you nuts by swatting you with their tails. Others are ridiculously friendly and like to lick you. The “divas” are proper girls who don’t like walking through the mud. Some love being filthy dirty. The “show cows” know they’re beautiful and
like to flaunt it.

Sounds a lot like my Facebook News Feed…

3 Three year-old in a puddle. Slideshow with captions. Just to make you like me again after broaching two Internet no-go topics…