clearbluecup

This morning I did something that made me really feel like a stay-at-home mom. I made chocolate puffed wheat squares. They were so quick and easy, so yummy and chocolatey and chewy and oops where did the other half of the pan go? It's the autumn eating season for sure. So, since I enjoyed gorging on them so much I will share the recipe I used, complete with my personal modifications.

6 Cups Organic kamut puffs (they were finger food for Bea until she realized that she could have much tastier things to eat, like raisins, and never ate a kamut puff again.)

2 Cups rolled oats (because I didn't have enough kamut puffs to fill out the recipe, but the oats go really well and I would include them again even if I did have enough puffed cereal.)

1/2 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup molasses (instead of corn syrup, which I never buy. The molasses is actually far tastier than corn syrup, and it is a good source of iron. Wow, these things are health food. I think I'll have another...)
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon vanilla

Melt butter over medium heat in saucepan, add sugar, molasses, cocoa and vanilla. Boil together for three minutes, then remove pan from heat, mix in kamut and oatmeal and spread the whole sticky mess into a greased 9x13 pan. Enjoy!

Bea and I have been going to Music Together classes for a few months now, on and off. The classes are great fun, our teacher is so enthusiastic and obviously loves spending her time making music with children, and we even learn a bit about music in the midst of having all kinds of fun singing and dancing and banging on instruments. Every week the format of the classes stays the same, and most weeks it seems like Bea is the same too.

But this week she was different, all of a sudden. Bea has been walking for several weeks, but before this week she would only walk between people, or from one piece of furniture to another. Although she had the physical skills, she hadn't yet built up the confidence to explore more broadly. Now she's walking around everywhere, even in music class where she has always wanted to stay close and hang on to one of my fingers when we were dancing or picking out an instrument to play.

So off she went, interacting with the other parents and children in the class, offering to share her triangle or rhythm stick, dancing in the middle of the circle or admiring the teacher's necklace. This amazing little person, who was once nothing but a dance in my heart or a twinkle in her father's eye, is out there in the world dancing by herself.

Now I know why parents cry when they send their kids off to kindergarten for the first time.

I just finished uploading a new batch of photos. They're on flickr now, and most of them have been set so that only friends and family can see them. I am still unsure whether I am going off the deep end in terms of photo privacy, but I figure I'll give this new extra-private method a shot and see what it is like. If you want to be able to see my friends and family photos now you'll need to set up a Flickr account, which is easy and doesn't take too long. Let me know what you think, if this is too much trouble or if you have no trouble at all. If it's not working for lots of you then I'll reconsider my photo strategy...

Last night I sat down to read Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. I was about 3/4 of the way through and as I sat there on the couch, wrapped up in my rainbow afghan and munching on dried dates, I was sucked into the space of fiction and didn't come out again until the book was done.

I can't remember the last time that had happened to me recently, although I spent a great deal of my childhood lying motionless on my bed with my head full of whatever fictional world I was reading about. Sometimes I felt more connected to that world than I did to the world of my friends and classmates, and I would read every single book ever written by an author I enjoyed, simply to get more of the flavour of their fictional worlds.

When I put the book down last night and got into bed, I dreamed Japanese Surrealist dreams, which culminated with Tom and I adopting a little boy who had once been adopted by Brad and Angelina but they couldn't keep him. He was named swim swim swim and when we finalized the adoption (at a checkout stand like those found in grocery stores), a troupe of baton twirlers dressed in red stretch satin sprang out and began to sing and dance, twirling their batons and smiling wide, plastic Hollywood smiles.

We went out to the Aquarium on Wednesday. Bea LOVED it. Unfortunately, now we're both sick and my writing brain is on the fritz, so I can't really think of anything else to say about our Aquarium trip. Photos are up on Flickr though. To see them you'll need to create a Flickr account and add me (clearbluecup) as a contact. It's easy, I promise. :)

Only mad dogs and Englishmen stay out in the midday sun, right? So only crazy Vancouverites head out to the frozen wasteland (I mean beautiful prairie) in the depths of winter.

Yes, that's right. We're coming to Edmonton, arriving just after Christmas and leaving just after New Year's. All of us, all together! Wheeee... We're starting to make plans, so if you'd like to meet Bea or hang out with one or all of us, let us know! We'd love to see ya.

When I was pregnant, someone asked me whether or not we would use a pacifier with our baby. I panicked, because I hadn't thought of that yet. I had planned out my diaper system, sorted and folded and washed and resorted all the white or neutral colored baby clothes, scoured the baby name book and done prenatal yoga every day in my 3rd trimester, but I hadn't worked out my stance on the pacifier yet.

So I went through the baby books and tried to decide what we would do with our baby. Pacifier? No. Formula? Definitely no. Early potty training? No. Cloth Diapers? Only if they're not too much trouble. Feeding on demand? Yes. Sleep training? No.

It all seemed so easy, so black and white. As if parenting choices could be turned into a multiple-choice exam, with bubble sheets to fill in with pencil and nice, crisp boundaries around each question.

As it turned out, it was not so black and white. We didn't use a pacifier for the first 10 weeks or so, but we did let Bea suck on our pinky fingers instead. How is that different? I don't know, except that my pinky finger is attached to my arm, which then had to dangle out of bed while she sucked on it, and I had to very carefully try to extract my finger from her mouth without waking her up so that I could fall asleep. When we finally gave her a pacifier, she went "glurmp!" and sucked away happily. I remember thinking, "wow, that thing works!" Now I can't even remember why I didn't want to give her one in the first place. I think it had something to do with seeing 5 year olds running around with pacifiers in their mouths, but perhaps that wouldn't have happened anyway. She gave up the pacifier herself around 6 months.

There have been many, many other decisions along the parenting road that I have made differently than I would have predicted when I was a mom-to-be. I have let her cry, not for hours at a time, but if she's playing around at bedtime sometimes she will have five or ten minutes by herself in the crib to think about why falling asleep is a good idea. We were not as careful about introducing solids as I would have thought we would be. I had imagined myself happily breastfeeding on demand through the second year, despite odd looks or toddler gymnastics, totally committed to doing the best thing for my baby's health and emotional well-being.

And here I am, weaning at 15 months.

The next time around, I will be more careful about judging others or saying "oh, I would never do that". Even if what they are doing seems uncaring, or lazy, or odd, there is no way to predict exactly what you will need to do for your own health and well-being as a parent, and no way to turn the glorious technicolor human experience of raising a child into yes and no tickboxes.

Why why why do I read the internet before waking up fully, before drinking my coffee, after being kicked in the face and forced out of my warm bed at 5:30am?

I am like a hermit crab without her shell when I first wake up in the morning. I am defenseless, easily affected by good writing and the image of Wal-Mart shipping goods from China on the backs of dolphins in order to bring costs down even more. The thought of the tar sands project makes me feel physically ill.

There is a voice inside my head that is shouting, "DO SOMETHING!" But what? So I do the only thing I know how right now, I write.