Christmas 2013

This fall we bid farewell to the girls’ play structure. They’ll be 13 soon and  agreed that they were not playing on it very much anymore, so it should go to our neighbours who have a 3 year old and new baby.  It was a bittersweet moment, watching it being dismantled and moved down the street at a stately pace on top of a trailer. I got positively teary. The removal of the play structure seemed to symbolize the end of their childhood somehow. I read a book last year where the author lamented that so many of the milestones in her children’s lives were about the last time. The last time they needed their night lights on, the last time they’d hold your hand in public, the last time you’d read a bedtime story to them. And while life certainly does feel like it’s speeding by on fast forward, I tend to take a more glass half full approach. On the girl’s path to adulthood it’s the first times that strike me as worth holding on to, the episode with the play structure excepted.

We’ve had lots of firsts this year.  It was the first year Caroline did not get homesick at camp. That was a huge first.  It was the first year we allowed the girls  to be home alone without a sitter. We started slowly by letting them come home from school instead of going to a sitter – which worked out very well. The fire department only had to come out to the house once.  On a related note, this year Sarah started baking on her own.  This year they left their elementary school and started grade 7 at High School in Orleans. That’s a big and very busy first. It seems they have something after school every night of the week, band, art, knitting, riding lessons.  Actually, the last two are not school-related. I started a knitting club on Tuesday nights for 4 of the neighbourhood kids, plus our two. The girls’ friends had been wanting to learn to knit so I finally buckled and started a Tuesday Night Knitting club. What started with 6 little girls sitting around the fireplace learning to knit, end up with 6 kids, 2 mums and one dad (not Murray) sitting around the fireplace every Tuesday knitting up a storm.  Murray says I’ve started a cult, or maybe a coven. Not quite, but a lot of people will be getting misshapen scarves and wrist warmers for Christmas this year and I can’t help but feel a little responsible.  I’ve been busily knitting Christmas gifts as well, with slightly better success than my students. I’ve done hats, felted cloches and ribbed beanies, as well as another batch of Swedish Santas, although time is running out on my being able to sew them together and stuff them, so someone may get a box of tiny woolen body parts,  which I’m sure will be a little disconcerting.

Oh, and one last thing, as I’m sure you all know by now, the girls have been asking Santa for a pony every year now since they were 5. Well,  you will be happy to hear that he finally came through. Oliver, a 12 year old registered paint, arrived a little before Christmas, and was greeted with much rejoicing. So most of our time this Christmas will be spent in a stable, which is just as it should be.

Merry Christmas everyone,

Have you noticed that you can’t buy Charlie Brown Christmas Trees anymore? All the trees on the lots are perfect, full and symmetrical and ruthlessly trimmed so that not a branch is out of place. They are not the trees of my childhood that’s for sure. It wasn’t Christmas without mum and dad bickering over the tree. I can even remember dad drilling holes in the trunk and ‘grafting in’ branches to make some sad little specimen he’d dragged home look a little fuller. And while I’m on the subject of trees, when did everyone start color coordinating their trees? Worse yet, having themed trees? Christmas trees should be filled with ornaments handed down though the generations, they should be hung with odd little concoctions of popsicle sticks and macaroni that your child made in kindergarten. They should not be coordinated to match your couch.

I was in Michael’s the other day and noticed they had something called scented tinsel. Really? Why  - does your tree not smell the way it should? Does it need tree deodorant? If so, why not just go to the nearest gas station and buy a dozen of those little pine tree shaped thingies you hang from your rear-view mirror? Throw those on your tree, oh wait I get it, they wouldn’t go with the theme. This madness has to stop. 

Sometimes the best lesson you can learn is that things do not need to be perfect. Relax, let your tree smell like a tree. Don’t worry if all those homemade ornaments clash with your color scheme. Proudly display the cookies decorated by your kids. 

Last November I broke my wrist when I slipped on some ice. Well, there are quite of few things you cannot do when your arm is in a cast, not the least of which is bake cookies, write Christmas cards, or wrap presents. All that pressure to do those things that you think absolutely have to be done to make Christmas perfect, didn’t get done last year. And in the end, it didn’t really matter. I did what I could and didn’t get stressed about what I couldn’t do. It was pretty good actually. The girls were a great help. We came up with lots of ingenious ways of getting things done with me giving instructions and them trying to carry them out. 

So, here’s to an imperfect Christmas, homemade and filled with things you love, whether they go with your decor or not. And just for fun, here’s a list of some of the things I love: 

• the wreath of tiny handprints the girls made in nursery school when they were 3.
• the musical Christmas Angel Murray’s dad bought in Germany that sits in the middle of our Advent wreath each year
• the cardboard Santa and sleigh my father got for Christmas in 1936
• Oh, and my grandmother’s kuchen - which is perfect, every year.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Home

I'm home today, as I am most days since leaving the high pressure world of software development, and a realtor delivered a letter to our door asking if we'd been interested in selling our house.  Someone saw it and is interested in buying. Sorry whoever you are, while I understand your desire to live here (and I can't imagine anyone that wouldn't), we're not going anywhere. This is home, we love it here. And it's not just because we have a nice house in a pretty village. We are part of a community that is close knit and unique. The village is where you know all your neighbours. Where people band together if you need help, and even people you don't know waive as they pass you in their cars. It's where all the neighbourhood kids can go out and play and parents come out with snacks for the whole gang. It's home and we're staying.

Slipping off the Mommy Track

It's been a long time since my last post, the blog muse deserted me and there seemed to be nothing new to write about. Village life follows the same soothing yearly patterns, Christmas Craft shows, Spring Church dinners, Summer Fair, Fall Festivals. We all just flow along downstream from year to year.

But this year, suddenly things have changed. Not in the village, but in my life. After 20 years in the high tech industry, I was laid off. I'm probably in the minority, a lot of my colleagues have gone through this a number of times. But it was a first for me. Then, a couple of weeks later, to add injury to insult, as my husband said, I slipped and broke my wrist. Sometimes you have to be hit over the head before you get the message: slow down.

So, that's what I've been doing. Slowing down, being a stay at home mum. Baking bread, knitting, being there after school to make snacks and help with homework. And you know what? Some days it's enough, and other days I'd kill to get back into office clothes and go to work. Not the I have the option of staying home permanently, but I've realized that I wouldn't want to. This is also a bit of a revelation for my retirement planning. With two girls still in grade school, I won't be retiring any time soon, which I've discovered is just as well because I need the socialization and structure that being employed provides.

So, I'm looking for something new, but still struggling with the balance thing. I think every mother does.

Chicken Dinners and a Twenty-Six minute walk to Saint-Chapelle. Or four hours if you are directionally challenged,

Another installment....happy reading.

Dinner Sunday night. Paris has the world’s best chicken. Really, when you go to Paris, or anywhere else in France for that matter,you have to seek out  a trattior that has one of those chicken roasting cabinets sitting outside on the sidewalk. The kind where they roast not only chickens but have a pan of potatoes under the chickens so that the potatoes roast in the chicken fat. Bliss That and a salad, bottle of vin makes the perfect meal. It was a great way to round out a very soggy day in Paris. We spent all day walking, which more of less was the idea, but we’d headed out in the morning to go to Saint Chapelle. Google said it was  a 26 minute walk from the apartment, but Google hadn’t counted on how directionally challenged Kate and I are, so it took about 4 hours - mind you we window shopped, stopped for coffee and browsed in books stores, but still. Getting back was also a challenge, but by then the girl GPS kicked in - “oh I remember this shop, it has the cute dress in the window we must be headed in the right direction because we passed this on our way out this morning...”

One of our detours along the way was a stop at Shakespeare and Company, Paris’s iconic English language bookstore. What a place it is. An old crumbly hole in the wall crammed stem to stern with books of all kinds. Books line the rickety stairs, there are weird little alcoves filled with moldering cushions and mouldering patrons and papered with little mementoes (the alcoves, not the patrons, but you never know) of people, students mostly by the look of it who were passing though. There’s a piano on one floor and someone was up there playing it. We browsed though the shelves and I  would have like to have bought a couple of posters from the box labeled, amusing posters, 1 euro each, but would never have got it back to the apartment in tact in the driving rain.

38 Rue Vaneau

our Paris saga continues.....(new posts will appear when my broken wrist improves)

Saturday, finally here, grey rainy Paris, hooray. What is it that makes Paris in the rain look all misty and romantic, while Ottawa in the rain just looks cold and grey - oh wait, I think I answered my own question.

We are met outside our apartment by Joel, the rep from Paris Address, company I rented the oh so cute 5th floor apartment with the sleeping loft from. This little adventure  had started out as a solo trip to celebrate, although that’s not quite the right word, my turning 50. There’s something about this milestone birthday that makes you evaluate your life. Fifty is tricky because while you don’t feel old, or even think you look old (more about this later), there’s no denying it. You have more years behind you than you have in front of you and it makes you think. What I thought about mainly was, why wasn’t I doing the things I love to do? In many respects I have a blessed life, I have a comfortable lifestyle, a husband I love and two daughters that are the joy and wonder of my life, yet I feel most of the time as if I’m just going through the motions of getting through the week, only to run around like mad on the weekend doing all the chores I didn’t have time to do during the week because I’m working. So, when 50 hit, and I realized, that well not to put too fine a point on it, I had if I was lucky about 30 years left, I decided that I’d better start doing the things I wanted to do now. Those things were, travel, France mostly, I’m in love with it and always have been, drawing - I’m not very good at it, but again, that shouldn’t stop you from doing it. If you never try, you’ll never know if you can get better, and write. I started a blog a couple of years back that probably only has 2 readers, but that isn’t the point. Writing, drawing and even traveling to some place you love should be done for yourself. So here I am, in Paris, sketch pad, and laptop in hand and ready to go. 

But I digress, I do that a lot. It’s one of those things you catch yourself doing more and more as you get old. Where was I? Oh, yes, we’re outside the apartment, waiting for Joel. He arrives and leads us up the 5 flights of very narrow stairs to the top of the building and our apartment with sleeping loft and pull out sofa bed which till be home to Kate, who decided to accompany me on this little jaunt after I’d rented the flat. We heave our two large bags up the incredibly old and increasingly more narrow stairs (it’s like the builders had ADHD and lost interest at about the third floor and just laid the stairs out any old way so they could call it a day.

We finally make it to the top though, huffing a puffing, and.... the pull out sofa bed isn’t. Isn’t a bed that is, it’s a sofa, but with no pull out bed. Looks like Kate and I get to share a bed, (see early entry about matching jackets). But no, Joel is very good about it, they told us there was a pull out bed, they made a mistake, they’d find us another flat that would have two beds. That’s how a few hours later we end up at 38 Rue Vaneau. 

Paris Diary - Bad Travel Karma and Matching Coats

When I was filing away my Paris pictures from a few weeks ago, I came across a travel diary I kept of Kate's and my visit last November, so here for your reading pleasure....

Paris Diary, Nov 5

Facebook:

Barbara - bad travel karma continues - traveling companion shows up wearing the SAME jacket. Now we have to go all over Paris looking like not-too-imaginative lesbians....

Andrew  -You need to upgrade to imaginative lesbians

Murray  - Say away from my fantasies

I always have bad travel karma, or to put in more precisely, my trips always start off badly, once I’m at my destination the first day under my belt, thing usually pick up quite nicely. This one began the morning I was to leave when one of my diamond earrings fell down the drain of the bathroom sink. You just know the day is going to go downhill from there.

Having got to the airport more or less in tact, leaving kids and husband at security, I decided to get a manicure at the gate, my usual pre-travel treat, and the manicurist cut my cuticle so badly we had to staunch the blood. Karma, bad or otherwise has some sort of celestial timing of its own, my travel companion, Kate, showed up at that very moment wearing the EXACT SAME jacket as me. Great, we get to spend a week walking around Paris looking like a pair of not too imaginative lesbians.

The windows at the Bon Marche made me laugh out loud. In case you didn't figure it out,  it's all about the lingerie.

Mark Twain was Right, a day in Lucerne

I'd been told I should really go to Lucerne before I left Switzerland, so today I bought a train ticket and took the short trip from Basel to Lucerne. It was supposed to be a beautiful day, 16C and sunny, but when I got there at 11:00 Lucerne was shrouded in fog. But fog is just what you need when you go to visit the Dying Lion monument. Mark Twain said it was the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world. I sat there for a long time looking at it, in the almost total silence of that place. I finally had to shake it off and head back to the old town and as I approached the lake, the sun burned through the clouds, the water sparkeled, the swans swam in graceful circles and the world, or at least Lucerne seemed to come to life again.

Basel

Well after a long absence, my first blog entry in what, 18 months? Somehow I just ran out of stream, although I doubt mine is the only blog out there who has been abandoned by its writer.

Be that as it may, I'm back with something to write about as I'm in Europe for two weeks. Basel and Paris to be exact. I'm in Basel for business. I love the city. It has an old town core with winding streets, and beautiful cathedral at its heart.

I'm also loving being back in a part of the world where spatzle is served with almost every entree, and if it's not spaztle, then it's rosti. It's the middle of hunting season here, so the menus are filled with venison. I've feasted on hirsh this and hirsh that almost every night. I could quit literally eat my way across Europe if given half the chance.

Merry Christmas Everyone

I’m sitting here enjoying the peace and quiet in that magical 20 minutes before your dinner party guests arrive, when the food is prepared, the champagne is chilling, the fire is crackling in the hearth and there’s nothing left to do but wait. It’s our annual Cassoulet Dinner. Every winter just as the temperature dips really low, Murray and I send out invitations to friends and neighbors to come for cassoulet. Cassoulet, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is basically baked beans that have died and gone to French heaven. It’s one of those dishes that is meant to spend days simmering on the hob in a provencal kitchen. In this case it spends days simmering in a slow cooker in our kitchen. It’s a tradition, much anticipated by all who come every year to enjoy it with us. And as I sit here, champagne glass in hand, I’m thinking of all the other traditions we hold close, most of which involve food, that help mark out the important events in our lives.

This year we lost Murray’s dad, and as sad as that was, what I remember now is the entire family sitting in our back garden every evening, all thirteen of us, eating together and reminiscing.

This Christmas morning like every other Christmas I can remember, we will slice into the first loaf of my grandmother’s Christmas Kuchen. Everything that is Christmas is wrapped up in my Grandmother’s kuchen. She made it every year, and when she passed away, my Mum picked up the torch, and now I make it for my family. And one day my girls will make it for theirs. Every time I make it I can smell Christmas, and I can see my grandmother standing in the kitchen, in her apron with the string of safety pins dangling from the bib, kneading the dough. It’s a sacred recipe, one that will never be given to anyone outside our family. It’s the embodiment of what a tradition should be, something that links past generations to future ones, and it’s at the heart of what Christmas is to us.

But there are other foods and traditions that aren’t weighted down with such gravitas; the girls have a tradition of asking Santa for a horse each year. They find new and inventive ways of asking (and spelling) but the end result is the same, no horse. For the last two years we’ve been having a New Year’s Eve fondue, because the only thing better than cheese is a giant pot of melted cheese. In fact Caroline has been making up her own version of the 12 Days of Christmas, the first verse of which is: On the first day of Christmas my Mummy gave to me, 100 pounds of cheese. It started off as 20 pounds a week ago and has been going up with each singing. Sarah has finally figured out that I’m Santa. It started out with her ‘gathering evidence’ that I was the Tooth Fairy (our note paper was the same), and then she asked if I was Santa too. I confessed, she looked thoughtful for a minute and then said, “then how do you make those sleigh tracks of the roof?” Maybe the magic is still there.

I hope the magic is still there for you too, hold on to your traditions, savor the wonder of the season, and carry peace and joy with you into the New Year.

Eating and Shopping, Shopping and Eating

One of the cool things about our apartment, is that is is 5 minutes (a real 5 minutes, not a 2 hour five minutes like the other day) away from the Bon Marche, and the Grand Epicerie de Paris - the latter being where Kate and I decided we want to go when we die. We could have spent the entire week in GEP and gone no where else and we would have gone home happy. As is was we came back with an exquisite box of macaroons and a box of Mariage Freres Earl Grey and French Blue tea.

We also bought gifts for our girls - underwear and t-shirts for mine. Sarah wanted camisoles to wear on gym days so no one can see her little chest when she changes into her gym clothes. We also bought Kate’s three girls some scarves and other bits of fun things we thought they’d like. In between all this altruistic shopping we ended up back at the Editeur Cafe for lunch. This time to have onion soup (for me in deference to my cold) and croque monseiur for Kate, just because it’s yummy. On to the Gallerie Lafayette for more shopping and then home for cocktail hour, and dinner. Tonight we used up the remains of the Divine chicken we had Sunday by turning it into chicken and artichoke pasta. Every meal looks so good we take a picture of it all laid out on the coffee table before we eat it.

Paris dans la Pluie

Another grey rainy day. It’s not like I wasn’t expecting this, you go to Paris in November, you have to put up with bad weather. Still, as I said before rainy and grey in Paris is better than rainy and grey in Ottawa. Anyway, today is our shopping day, so we’ll be inside most of the day. I’m suffering from the cold Murray so kindly gave. me. Quelching around in the rain all day yesterday certainly didn’t help. It had more of less been kept at bay until last night when I started sneezing and streaming. I took a long hot bath, drank some Neo Citron, which I had the foresight to bring along, and went to bed, I woke up this morning feeling no better at all but decided to do what I usually do when I’m sick, just ignore it and hope it will go away. If I’m not better tomorrow morning, I’ll go into a Pharmacy and try to get something to clear up the congestion - the French are such hypochondriacs that they’re bound to have some great over the counter medicine to speed my recovery.

Dinner in Paris

Dinner Sunday night. Paris has the world’s best chicken. We found one of those trattiors on rue du Buci that have the chicken roasting cabinets outside. The kind where they roast not only chickens but have a pan of potatoes under the chickens so that the potatoes roast in the chicken fat. Bliss That a salad and a bottle of vin makes the perfect meal. It was a great way to round out a very soggy day in Paris. We spent all day walking, which more of less was the idea, but we’d headed out in the morning to go to Saint Chapelle. Google said it was a 26 minute walk from the apartment, but Google hadn’t counted on how directionally challenged Kate and I are, so it took about 4 hours - mind you we window shopped, stopped for coffee and browsed in books stores, but still. Getting back was also a challenge, but by then the girl GPS kicked in - oh I remember this shop, it has the cute dress in the window we must be headed in the right direction because we passed this on our way out this morning. We finally got back to the apartment, dried our soggy shoes out under the rads and settled in for a nice quiet night chez nous.

Bonfire Time

What better way to spend a sunny October afternoon? We had just come back from lunch up at Chateau Montebello, and decided it was just too nice to go indoors, so Murray lit a bonfire, put some jazz on the laptop, and we all sat in the autumn sunshine reading, sipping hot cider, and just enjoying the day.

The scene just screamed blog post.

We've had a few sunny weekends this October. Thanksgiving was another - and once again we stayed outside and enjoyed every last minute of sunshine while we could. This involved having a Thanksgiving lunch out under the trees. Sadly, there are no pictures, but it was spectacular, you'll just have to trust me on this. We had soup, homemade foccacia, cheese, and lots of good conversation and sunshine. What could be more perfect?

Fall Nesting - Apple picking

The Zen of Apple Picking

One of my fall nesting must-do's is taking the girls apple picking. It was a beautiful sunny day Sunday, the smell of woodsmoke was in the air, and the tips of the trees are just turning colour - so inspired by all the wonderful coziness of fall, we headed out to a nearby orchard and picked a couple of bags full of Cortlands, then it was home to make a batch of apple cole slaw to have with our chicken burgers, and some apple crisp for dessert. Ahhhh.

It's been a long time....

I've written a number of posts in my head over the past few months, and somehow just never got around to committing them to my blog, so in a effort to make up for lost time, here goes:

Goodbye to Laura's Corners
The much-loved store and village gem closed it's doors on the May long weekend. The owners just couldn't compete with the big box stores in the ever encroaching suburbs. My girls are still heart broken, and the sight of the little white house with its forlorn "To Rent" sign out front just adds salt to their wounds. I too sorely miss the store, but wish the owners well in whatever comes next for them.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Waiting for the School Bus

The inventiveness of children is a wonder. The girls have devised a tic tac toe game they play while waiting for the school bus each morning. What you do is grab four rushes from the ditch, arrange them in a grid, use clover heads and pebbles to play. Keep score with leaves.

Rain, Hail, Snow...I know let's go Camping

Yes, in the midst of the worse spring weather we've had to date, the Navan Girl Guide troops had their annual end of year camp at MacSkimming this weekend. I'd gone out Friday afternoon and kitted the girls out with $200 worth of rain gear - jackets, pants, hats. Good thing too. With the temperature in the single digits and the rain/hail/snow pelting down, they certainly needed it.

Caroline, not the happiest of campers

The cook house was nice an toasty, and they kept the wood stoves in the log cabins going all day, but I'm sure it was still a test of their endurance.

We came back Sunday morning to a bunch of very excited little girls who looked like they had the time of their life, and a bunch of very tired looking leaders who looked like...well who looked like they spent all weekend in the cold and wet trying to keep 60 plus little girls entertained and happy. My hat goes off to each and every one of them.