Hair off

Erin got her hair chopped off in January, sending eight thick hanks of 18-inch long hair off to Locks of Love. Recently Sophie decided she had finished her tenure as a long-haired kid. I wasn't sure that she was sure about her decision, so I didn't jump in right away to get her an appointment at the salon. But soon occasional comments turned to nagging at me to book her appointment and when I did she counted down the days eagerly.

Look at all that amazing blond hair! She's had a tiny trim once in a while but other than that hasn't had her hair cut since she was a preschooler. It shines like gold and is so beautiful. I wondered if I would miss it, even if she wouldn't.

The bottom got a trim first, because that's the way the Locks of Love people want it. Just half an inch or so to get rid of the wispy ends.

Then the little elastics went in and the scissors started sawing. I wondered if Sophie would have panicky second thoughts. I had asked her before if she was nervous, and like a good little violinist she said "not nervous, but excited!" She's well-trained to read those fluttery-tummy feelings as excitement rather than fear!

By the time her hair was dry even I was thinking "this is how her hair was meant to be -- it suits her perfectly!" In fact I was already forgetting that she'd ever had long hair. Her new bob looked totally normal and right.

It's been a week now. She loves it. It takes a few seconds to brush and a couple of minutes to wash. She enjoys the look and the feel and says she has not a single regret.

I don't miss her long tresses at all. I can hardly even remember them. I'm glad I took that first picture!

Twenty-one years old

This is probably the first significant item of real quality that I bought. Fresh out of my internship, I dropped a thousand dollars and change on a good road bike. This is a lesson in the wisdom of buying quality. My 21-year-old bike is still a wonderful machine. Today I started tuning it up. I want to start riding it more again, and it is still completely up to the task.

My love affair with bicycles began on my 11th birthday. I was given a "ten-speed" bike, a real grown-up one with 27" wheels. I remember the day well. There had been a bit of an ice-storm overnight. The bike had been hidden in the neighbours' garage. I could not ride it outside until the ice melted, but I fell in love with it inside. It was silver.

I rode that bike everywhere. I went on adventures. Even back then I was drawn to distance. My brother and I would get up at dawn and bike out of the city and along county roads to other villages, exploring and relishing our freedom. We probably got up to things my parents would have been horrified by. But hey, we survived, and I have such memories of those days!

As the bike began to wear out, I became a bike mechanic. I could tear that bike apart to the ball bearings and put it back together. I bought parts and tools, I replaced chain links, I repacked the headset and crankset. I lubed, I cleaned, I replaced, I repainted. But eventually over the years the poor thing just kind of wore out.

I bought myself a new bike, slightly better-made, thought still a cheap chain store bike, about the time I headed off to university. It wasn't a great bike but I looked after it really well and added a few accessories to make it look great. It was stolen from where I'd locked it up in the parkade by my apartment about three years after I got it.

My next bike was actually a decent road bike. I think I paid $450 for it. It was lighter and snappier. I started enjoying longer rides on it. I fitted it with panniers and biked all over southwestern Ontario on it. Not extended tours, but 50 or 100 km a day over a weekend, visiting people, going places. During my internship year I biked all around the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland on it. I also acquired an inexpensive mountain bike to help me get around the hills in St. John's, and to help bail me out in the winter when my horrid car stopped working.

The next year I had an actual income. I was living in Halifax, another region with superb road-riding routes. And I fell in love with the Terry Symmetry I stumbled upon in at the Trail Shop. It's a bike engineered for short women -- that's me! The top tube is very short, thanks in part to the 24" front wheel. Other things are sized down too -- the handlebars, the cranks, the brake levers. It fitted me beautifully and weighed next to nothing. I sold both my other bikes and bought it. I rode a hundred miles on it the following Saturday, and felt just fine the next day. I rode it lots and lots in Nova Scotia.

When I moved to BC, though, I moved to a town on the side of a mountain, with nothing but hills ... and a huge network of world-class single-track mountain bike trails. So I bought a mountain bike and cranked most of my miles on that. And once we moved to the slightly-flatter town where we now live, we had kids, so even if I was riding on the road I was generally hauling two kids in a trailer, and I needed the granny gear of the mountain bike. My Terry Symmetry spent a lot of time collecting dust after that.

Now that I'm in decent shape again, and the kids no longer need to be hauled about in a trailer, it's time to start riding my Terry again. It needs some new rubber up front and a new real derailleur cable before too long, and I want to upgrade to SPD clipless pedals. Other than that, though, everything is ticking and humming and spinning as it should.

Archived!

I write this blog for many reasons. Some are about the process, but several are also related to the product. The accumulated virtual scrapbook is an important memento of family activities, adventures, challenges and milestones. Important not just to me, and not just in a nostalgic way, but also to the kids and also in ways that reassure and re-affirm.

I sometimes worried that I didn't have a backup copy of the blog, that it could theoretically just disappear from the web with a server crash or a reconfiguration or something and all those precious mementos would be gone. I also like the idea of having a tangible record, something I can hold in my hand and flip through, sit on the deck or curl up in bed with, or show to others.

So a month ago I clicked "submit" at Blog2Print and ordered up hardbound volumes of my early blog posts. I put 2003-2006 in one volume, and 2007, the year I really got hard-core as a blogger, into it's own separate volume.

The books arrived today. They're beautiful. The paper and print quality is excellent, the photos are clean and clear, at least as much as my early low-resolution images would allow. The glossy cover is well-applied and attractive. The indexing is accurate. Each volume is about 200 pages. They weren't cheap, though compared to scrapbooking as a hobby they were certainly a reasonable alternative. My kids have already spent lots of time delightedly flipping through and reading aloud to each other from funny entries, enjoying the portrayals of their younger selves and the memories of things past.

If a virus eats Blogger it's okay now. Though I guess first I should get my 2008 and 2009 volumes ordered.

Hamlet

My four kids, and their friend Danika, after a music rehearsal held at the school last night. Listening to and/or participating in a dramatic reading of the last few scenes of Hamlet.

Why? I don't really know. But they seemed quite enraptured.

A new malady

Sophie thinks it is silly that the common cold is called "a cold" when it isn't caused by the cold weather, rather by the fact that in cold weather we all hang out inside with closed windows breathing each other's germy air. She suggests it should instead be called "cabin fever." Very apt, I say.

On the couch

Many of you have asked how Sophie is doing. Things are pretty good. She's still really tired, and still has some mild belly pain, but her fever has not returned and she's now been off her antibiotics for five days. She's spending much of the day on the couch, but her couch demeanor is much improved (see photo). Rather than lying there staring into space and napping, she's now smiling, laughing, goofing around.

Insurance Gratitude

It was almost as an afterthought that Chuck bought travel medical insurance for our family as we headed out on our first out-of-country holiday. As Canadians we take universal medicare for granted. Our kids are healthy. Other than Noah's croup at age 3 months I don't think any of them have ever been sick enough or injured enough to see a doctor. But luckily Chuck paid the $40 for nine days of travel medical insurance. And luckily we have one of those auto insurance plans that covers you for rental vehicles. Because within five days we would need both of those insurance plans.

Sophie got sick almost as soon as we crossed the border into the US. At first it was mild and non-specific, but was we made our way down the coast of California on the train we started getting worried. By the time we got her to a hospital ER the next day she had perforated her appendix. We racked up medical bills pretty quickly after that. Within an hour or two she'd had blood work, plain xrays, an ultrasound and a CT scan. The surgeon had been consulted and she'd been referred to the pediatric surgery department at a major teaching hospital. What followed was a lights-and-sirens 70 mile ambulance transfer, assessment by two physicians in ER, admission as an in-patient and two days of IV's, antibiotics, morphine and repeated assessments by the surgical team. It would have cost a fortune.

On the second morning she was in hospital I was driving the 70 miles in to trade off with Chuck at her bedside. I'd got up early and was cruising along the interstate hoping to be there early. Some guy in a paratransit van pulled over into my lane without looking, side-swiping the rental vehicle, creating dents all down the two passenger side doors. He'd been reported to the police for erratic driving 20 minutes earlier, and his octagenarian passengers told the police that his driving was "terrible!" so there was no question where the fault lay. But still, without an insurance company to broker the claim on our behalf we would probably have had to pay out of pocket and I'm sure it would have been tough to pursue a personal claim against him from Canada.

(They do say that bad luck comes in twos, right? That stuff about threes is just a myth. I hope. If not, can I count the fact that it has rained on us here in the desert as our third bit of bad luck, please? I don't think I can take any more catastrophes.)

Anyway, I am very thankful for the insurance we carried on this trip. We've never before had to rely on insurance like this. It has worked flawlessly for us.

Oh, and for those who haven't followed the saga on Facebook, I'll just reassure you that no one was injured in the car accident, and Sophie is out of hospital and doing fairly well, choking back her antibiotics and codeine like a trooper, and managing to eat a bit too.

Getting ready

It was less than three weeks ago that we found out Chuck could get enough time off in early February for a family vacation. We began thinking about what we could do. When we discussed it, the kids unanimously agreed that their favourite vacation ever was the one where we rented a cabin for a week somewhere fairly interesting and different from home, but where the pace of life was still slow and rural. That was in the fall of 2006 when we spent a week in September on a gulf island north of Vancouver. We haven't really taken a proper vacation since. We did a 3-day canoe trip on our hometown lake the next year, and then the following year we squeezed a train trip and a couple of days of sight-seeing into a family wedding excursion. But a "get away and relax" vacation? It's been well over 3 years.

We bumped into some local friends at our favourite café the day after we found out about Chuck's time off. They had done a trip they had loved down the west coast of the US via train to the desert and I'd kept that kernel of an idea in my head. We picked their brains about it, listened to their rave reviews and advice. And came home and started working away with Google Earth, Firefox and Google.

Within a couple of days it all fell into place. We'll be taking the train from the US city five hours south of us, heading out to the coast on one overnighter and connecting with another overnighter in Portland. And get this -- we'll have sleepers both nights! On Amtrak the sleeping berths are actually affordable.

We'll arrive in LA, rent a minivan and head out to the high desert, staying at a swanky owner-direct vacation rental near Joshua Tree National Park for a week. We plan to do lots of rock-climbing, hike around, explore the desert and some canyons, hang out, play games, play music, visit some friends who live nearby and somewhere along the way see Avatar in 3D, a luxury not available in our area. Chuck and I spent some time in Joshua Tree before we had kids and loved it. It will be colder this time, but it will be awfully nice not to be in the thick of a Canadian winter, especially the disappointingly warm one we've been having so far which has left us with little snow but a lot of ice and dirt.

I'm planning on running a lot! I'll have the time, and I expect the weather will be perfect with daily highs about 15 C. Desert running ... I can't wait. I'm managing to squeeze in 15 miles a week lately with no recurrence of my hip pain, feeling stronger and running faster week by week.

Two-day train trips tend to be fun and exciting on the outgoing leg, but not so much on the return leg a week later, so we'll being doing the environmentally nasty thing and flying home, saving a lot of time and a fair bit of money.

Mystery image

What is this? It's inspiring my whole family right now. We can't wait. We're stretching, working out at the gym, swiping our credit cards, digging out our passports, counting the days... nineteen, eighteen, seventeen....

Fairly blind luck

How lucky was this? I managed to buy something for my 16-year-old's birthday that she didn't even imagine she wanted, that it turned out was très cool and exactly what she wanted. Vintage Swiss army leather motorcycle spats. Who'd have thought?

I am definitely not this cool. Just lucky. She's hardly taken them off since she got them.

Me 'n my baby

I'm never in the photos in my own blog. We stopped for lunch yesterday, though -- we had been hoping to skate on the community rink at the café but it was too warm -- and one of the teens we had along for the ride was a bit of a shutterbug. Unlike my kids.

She took the camera I had brought and started snapping photos. Amongst them was a goofy one of Fiona and me. So here I am, in my own blog! With my "baby," who will soon be seven. Which is surprising in some ways, because it seems like just yesterday I was pregnant with her. And it means I'm getting close to 50. But in many ways she's seemed older than 6 for a long long time.

Mac Love

The uncharacteristic silence from my keyboard is more apparent than real. I'm not blogging much because I'm in love with my iMac. After plugging it in I decided to see how much I could do without buying replacement software for all the things I'd enjoyed working with on my PC.

We bought our first PC in 1990. It wasn't my first computer -- that had been a Commodore 64 back in 1985. But the PC was my first home office tool. The three commercial task-oriented pieces of software I bought for it were Adobe (then Aldus) Pagemaker for desktop publishing, CorelDraw for vector graphics and Finale for music publishing. I upgraded over the years, and eventually switched to PaintShop Pro for graphics, but otherwise stayed fairly loyal to my software and fairly consistent in what I used my computer for. I got into web publishing, video-editing and photo-editing and added bits of software for those things. More and more open source software, as it turned out. But the bulk of what I was doing was graphics and publishing.

In the meantime I had fallen in love with my iPod. And iTunes. 

It dawned on me that the sorts of things I was doing with my computer, and had from the start, were the sorts of things that Macs were renowned for. I wasn't gaming, or crunching numbers. I wasn't buying tons of commercial software.

Then I saw a Mac ad at the moment that I was just beginning to think about the necessity of making the leap to a new PC, of leaving Windows XP behind and take on Windows 7. It was an epiphany moment. The timing was right for me.

My music publishing program, which I love and will never leave, is cross-platform, so that was the first thing I loaded. And it was really the only piece of commercial software I installed.  Everything else has been open source, or included with the Mac, and it all functions so much better than the commercial PC software I'd been studiously upgrading for years. Gimp, iMovie, iPhoto and Scribus are keeping me happily busy learning to do things that I never imagined possible -- for free. This week I'm especially enamoured of Scribus which is so much more robust than Pagemaker ever was.

So yeah, I'm in love with my Mac. Forgive the blog silence.

Not all fun and games

Someone commented to me (about our recent changes in daily structure):

"Life is not all fun and games and shouldn't be treated as such, sometimes there are things that we have to do even when we don't want to..."

I think this is a little simplistic. I agree that life is not all fun and games. However, my approach has been to try to help my kids look beyond immediate wants to more abstract wants. For instance, Noah wants to be able to play Beethoven, Dvorak and Schubert string quartets, to get the thrill of performing those great works, to experience the joy of working with others on that common goal. Those are abstract, long-term goals. In order to have those 'wants' satisfied, that means practicing scales and studies on the viola today, and tomorrow, and every day. And that may not be intrinsically enjoyable. But does he want to become a better viola player? And does he recognize that this is part of that process? Yes! And so it's no hardship to motivate himself to do the daily scales and studies. He has made the connection and he actually wants to do his practicing even if he doesn't always feel like doing it.

So rather than saying "sometimes we have to do stuff we don't want to" I prefer to say "sometimes we have to do stuff we don't feel like doing because it gets us stuff we really want." I think that's a much healthier long-lasting message to get, because ultimately it facilitates self-regulation and doesn't rely on other people setting rules for us.

Helping kids forge those connections between immediate action and big-picture wants is one of the most difficult parenting tasks, I think. My kids definitely want more balanced lives; they want to be healthy, helpful, good people with strong relationships. They're just not yet always naturals at connecting their immediate actions to those bigger-picture goals. I think that they needed a little remedial teaching in this respect -- someone to forcefully point their gaze at those longer-term goals, and give them a little experience with the habits of behaviour that serve those goals, so that they can re-affirm the connection between them -- and strengthen it within themselves.

At least that's what I'm trying to do. Time will tell.

The Yin and Yang of Computer Cables

I used to laugh at people who got panicky when they needed to set up their own PCs. They'd worry what would go wrong if they plugged something in the wrong way.

I'd reassure them that it was really easy. The cables only connect one way. You can tell by the plugs and jacks how they fit together. You just have to match up the shapes of the plugs to the shapes of the jacks. Of course you needed to figure out how all the audio cables work; the microphone and the speakers are sometimes colour coded. If not, you pay attention to which peripheral the cable is coming from and you look for the little icon on the back of the CPU and choose the correct one. And the webcam and the printer are best to hook in while you're down on the floor with a flashlight looking for the correct jack. The mouse too. Match up cables and their plugs to the jacks in your CPU and you'll be all set.

You should end up with something like the photo shown here. A bunch of different cables heading down through a hole in your desk to the CPU beneath. The last step is to hook your modem or network cable up from the CPU.

Yesterday I unpacked my new iMac. Here's the sum total of the cable connections required to set the thing up: one AC power cord heading to the wall. End of story.

Repeat copier miracle

I bought my copier / printer / multifunction machine a couple of years ago. I loved that machine. As soon as I got it home I was questioning how all the music teachers and homeschooling parents and society board members of the past had ever survived without one.

Then it died last February. Nasty error messages concerning the toner cartridge that responded to none of my resourceful trouble-shooting. I put the thing on the floor for a month. I despaired. But after some time passed I plugged it in and tried it again -- and there was a miracle! It worked.

Until the middle of September. Same error message. I tried all the same trouble-shooting. I turned it off for a couple of weeks. I moved it onto the floor. I put it back. I turned it on. I tried everything all over again. No miracle.

I was talking to a friend today about the lack of a repeat miracle, and how I'd ask for a new one for Christmas except that I couldn't bear to landfill a great hunk of glass, plastic and metal after just a couple of years. Jokingly I said I'd try turning it on again.

A second miracle has occurred.

Fashion show!

Outfit number one of many for each girl. They made good choices, and sizes are perfect -- room to grow but not too big.

Hyperbole

Thirteen staples per gram. Seventy-three point eight grams of staples this afternoon, meaning just under a thousand. Combined with yesterday's now-disposed-of staples, I suppose I must revise my staple estimate to more like three thousand for the whole chair.

Still, when every single one must be pried out with brute force (read: two-hand grasp, feet planted, twist and grunt) that seems like a lot. This is a well-made chair.

The chair

This chair was removed from the living room to facilitate reflooring three months ago. I couldn't bear to return it. Partly because the burgundy / green / blue upholstery is pretty weird with our orange and red walls. Partly because of its state of repair.

It's a nice reclining wing-back chair. We bought it more than 16 years ago. A good-quality classic piece. I loved the upholstery for many years, and I'd still love it, if it wasn't permanently filthy and full of holes and if we didn't have red and orange walls. But it is, and we do.

So this weekend we're beginning to disassemble it with a view to re-upholstering it ourselves. I've put my
crew to work with pliers and screwdrivers. It seems that our chair is made of some nice fabric, some foam, some wood and about 47,000 staples. We're now something like 29,000 staples into the endeavour and we have blistered fingers and thumbs and sore wrists.

I'm taking a zillion photos in the vain hope that I'll be able to efficiently retrace the dis-upholstering path backwards with the new fabric.

So far we've discovered where all the potato chip crumbs, popcorn kernels and Christmas tree needles have ended up over the years. We've discovered why the wing on the left was wobbly -- only the fabric was holding it in place. We have yet to discover where the broken wire is from, but that will probably reveal itself around staple number 42,145.

Here's what we're thinking we'll re-upholster it with. We'll pull all the old fabric off, lay it out and measure the yardage we need. This new fabric works nicely with the wall colours and the floor. And it has the added bonus of pulling the couch into the décor, because the blue in it matches the blue couch almost perfectly. And since the couch is somewhat less bedraggled looking than the chair, and likely has over 100,000 staples, it's going to be a while before we re-upholster it.

The big spree

Unlike their older sister, Fiona and Sophie kind of like clothes. They think the clothes in the Lands End kids catalogues are cute and really cool. But they recognize that we are more of a thrift store family; we don't spend that kind of money on clothes very often. However, both of them are very good at saving their allowance money, and it suddenly dawned on them that they had a lot of savings that could be spent on whatever swanky new Lands End clothes they wanted. They spent at least a couple of hours going through the catalogue, circling things, adding up prices, putting in question marks, revising their lists, recalculating. They needed to also estimate US dollar conversion, duty and shipping.

We agreed that "need to have" clothes would be purchased out of family resources from the usual thrifty sources, while they could buy the pricier, more frivolous things for themselves.

Eventually they decided on their order and went on-line. That's when we discovered on-line pricing and the fall sale. Most things were on sale. Sometimes it was "Buy 2 or more and save $2.50 on each." In this case she and Sophie negotiated with each other to buy different versions of similar items and get the savings.

"Okay, so if I buy jeans instead of yoga pants, will you get some of the leggings so that I can get the cheaper price on those?"

Some things were 60-80% off if you bought them in particular colours. They were persuaded to purchase the cheaper colours. And some items just had standard sale prices.

Fiona had planned to spend just over $100. Her order came in at just less than $70. So she bought a couple more sale items. Sophie's savings were similar. Then I remembered a coupon that meant if they bought one more regular-priced item, they'd get $25 off. So they basically got one expensive item for free.

We had to discuss how to share that coupon fairly. They both recognized that although it seemed like it was the last item of Sophie's that we got "for free" that really the coupon should be shared more equitably. It turned out that the $25 pretty much equalled the shipping cost. So that was easy. Each girl was billed for the cost of her items and neither paid shipping.

The order shipped yesterday. They're really excited. I'm happy that a big chunk of their allowance savings has been spent on something other than gum, iPods or computer games.

Other uses for the deck

So far the deck has been used for hula-hooping, playing with the dog, playing guitar, practising violin, holding a good-bye party for some friends, barbequeing dinner... and this family past-time, reading.

Fiona has rollicked her way through both Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, plus another easy reader type chapter book, in less than 5 days. Like with her kids' marathon and her violin practicing she's always been good at slow-and-steady stuff. These are not the most challenging nor the biggest books she's read. But she's reading so much faster now, and for much greater lengths of time, so that the brief time it's taken her to read through these is unprecedented.

The last few days she's been making me laugh so hard with her impetuous little admonishments. She really 'gets' her mom and knows how to make me laugh and get what she wants at the same time ... clever little thing!

Example 1:

F: (is nattering on about something, asks a question ...)
M: (distracted) Hmmm.... I don't know.
[a minute of silence ... M is on the computer and has forgotten F is even there]
F: (in M's face with that glint in her eye -- she already knows the answer) Mommy, do you really not know, or were you just not paying any attention to what I was saying?

Example 2:

F is reheating waffles in the toaster. This part she does by herself, but she doesn't like pouring the maple syrup and always asks for help. I am nearby, but busy with cleaning and tidying.
F: My waffles popped up!
M: Mmm-hmm.
[silence ... M continues with housekeeping]
F: (in M's face with that glint in her eye again) Isn't that supposed to mean something to you?

I poured the maple syrup.