Time Out

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Woo had expressed an interest in going to my father-in-law’s funeral service and we felt that it was important to include him. The funeral was yesterday, and the service was beautiful. While Woo did sit and pay attention to some of the it, but it was long, and he is three.  I spent some of it crawling after him, keeping him quiet and preoccupied, and trying to appease him until the organ started playing again.

I think that he did get something out of it, despite his fidgeting.  He got to see others grieving, to hear again what a wonderful man his grandfather was, and know that others will miss him too.  I was surprised that I was glad to have him there too.  In one of the moments when he was sitting quietly between Willy and I, he sensed that I was crying.  Turning to look up at me, he gave me a concerned look.  He then wiped my tears away with his hands, and threw his arm around my neck in the tightest, longest hug.  It was such a wonderful, sweet gesture from a little boy trying to make his Mama feel better.  I am so glad he came.

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Willy has been away for much of the last week, and it has been a long week without him.  So long that I am pretty sure that there were a couple of extra days in there somewhere.  He travels frequently enough that I am used to being home with the lils, and know that I will appreciate him even more when he gets home.  He spoils me, and I SUCK at being a single parent.  Some evidence to support this:

There are currently eleven loads of laundry filling the two couches in my family room.  They just keep piling up, and I do not have time to fold them.  When I get the lils dressed I just reach in to the pile and pull out their clothes for the day.  Same with pajamas at night. I actually gave serious consideration to just putting Goose in disposable diapers on more than one occasion this week, because the diapers were too buried in the piles.

Our meal selection has been terrible this week.  I just throw stuff on the table, and hope that they eat it. If they don’t, I just offer something else, or ask them to tell me what they will eat.  There have been at least two occasions this week where we have all eaten different meals because I didn’t have the energy and ability to make meals and combat the “I don’t want to eat that” so I gave in, plenty.

I have not bathed either of them.  Not once.

There was a toysplosion in pretty much every room of the house.  I stopped bothering to pick the toys up and haven’t even thought to ask them too.  It is MUCH easier to just move to another room and play there.

Woo has taken to reminding me to do things that I really should be remembering.  This includes things that I really should be remembering, like feeding the cat, bringing the diaper bag to daycare, and giving him his puffer.  You know, the medicine that helps him breath, that he takes every day?!  I would not remember these things, if not for his reminder.  That is too much to ask from my THREE year old.

We have been late to day care everyday this week, even the days that I don’t have to get ready for work.  Getting their breakfast on the table, feeding the cat, getting them dressed, in the car and buckled in, and finally leaving seems to take four times as long as it should.  This doesn’t take into account the return trips to pick up the things that we forgot.

All of these things have made me appreciate Willy all the more for all of the wonderful help and support that he is at home.  They actually make me feel that I am the one that supports him around here.  They also increase the admiration that I have for all the single parents that I know.  They are all so together and on top of things.  I can’t begin to imagine how they do it!!

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I have  a post up at Kids in the Capital today, talking about my weekend adventure with Goose, to Mud Lake!

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The littles and I were having dinner tonight, and a perfectly innocent request to have Woo finish his milk turned into an amusing conversation about where our meat comes from.  We have always been very upfront about where food comes from, so I am pretty used to questions that seek to confirm where our food comes from.

We have these cute glasses that have animals on them.  Tonight Woo was using one with a pig on it for his milk.  At one point he studied the glass for a few minutes and then said, “Do you know why there is a pig on this glass?  Because pigs give us milk.”

“Pigs give us bacon, ham, and pork,” I said, “but cows give us milk.”

There was another moment of quiet reflection, then he asked, “From a DEAD pig?  Why does this pig give us a dead pig so we can get bacon, ham or pork??”

I am still giggling at picturing this cute little pig on the glass presenting us with a dead pig and asking which meat we wanted. My laughter might have encouraged my little comedian. He provided the answer to his next question, about which animal gives us french fries.  The “potato animal”, of course!

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I have to start by saying that I LOVE my house, although I didn’t immediately LOVE it like this. Willy and I never saw the house together before we took possession, and were actually in different cities when we made the decision to buy the house. We had been looking for a house for about three months, with me doing the scouting visit, and a joint follow-up if the house was a contender. I liked this house, but our travel schedules conflicted and he had to do the follow-up solo. He saw our life here and we bought the house.

We moved in, I fell in love with the house, and we started making some of the changes we planned to update the look of the house. The usual take down a wall here, change the tile there type of updates. That was when we started to notice a few things… a live wire buried in the attic, improperly supported walls, generally half-assed work that caused our scope to creep so that we could fix the house. It was clearly obvious that the previous owners had used contractors who were great at making bad work look really good.

Unfortunately the previous owners had done extensive renovations and additions to our house. The year after we moved in a large crack developed in the wall to our family room. We did some exploratory digging, which led to more digging, and determined that the foundation under almost half of our house was decaying.  It needed replacing.  Two years, a gazillion dollars later, and more crazy bad work by previous contractors we had replaced the foundation.  This bad work included a septic tank left with in the foundation, under our kitchen.  A septic tank that wasn’t emptied before it was built on top of!  In the end we were happy and had a bigger house, as we had added to our basement (they were digging anyways…).  It was a long and slow renovation, with much of the digging being done by hand, but it ended with a solid foundation.

A solid foundation under half of the house, that is.  After the renovation was complete, I kept checking the cracks in the other parts of the house compulsively to make sure that they weren’t changing.  I knew that I wouldn’t be able to relax until I knew that the rest of the house wasn’t going to  crumble, so last fall we had an engineer come and checkout the house.  He gave us a good report, but agreed with my suggestion that preventative resealing of the foundation was a good idea.

Last week we started the digging to reseal the foundation.  They dug, and found some expected repairs, but also found some unexpected repairs that has led to the inevitable scope creep.  There is a good deal of work that needs to be done to the foundation under our garage.  It looks like there will need to be more repairs done to the room adjacent to the garage, but they haven’t dug that up yet.  I cringe.

It’s the money pit, but it’s our money pit.  It’s our forever house and we love it.  It would be nice if it would stop breaking now.

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As is the case with the last Sunday in September each year, there will be a service on Parliament Hill this Sunday morning honouring those Police and Peace officers who lost their lives in the line of duty.  It is specifically designed to commemorate those officers who lost their lives over the course of the last year, but also incorporates the remembrance of all officers who have died while on duty.

The service began following the death of Ottawa Police Constable David Kirkwood, and was borne of the desire of his colleagues to keep his memory alive.  They held a memorial on Parliament Hill on the last Sunday of the September in 1978, the year following his death, and thus began a tradition.  There is now a permanent Memorial on the Hill, behind the Peace Tower.  Beside it are twenty-eight plaques that are etched with the names of the fallen officers, including those who passed away prior to the creation of the monument.  As of this year, there are 771 names on the Memorial, including the names of the seven officers who lost their lives in the last year. Sadly there are additions to this Memorial every year.

This year, the following officers will be added to the memorial:
Constable Chelsey Robinson – June 21, 2010 (RCMP)
Constable Vu Pham – March 8, 2010 (Ontario Provincial Police)
Constable A. James Ochakovsky –March 2, 2010 (Peel Regional Police)
Chief Superintendent Douglas E. Coates – January 16, 2010 (RCMP)
Sergeant Mark Gallagher – January 12, 2010 (RCMP)
Constable I. Eric Czapnik – December 29, 2009 (Ottawa Police)
Constable Mélanie Roy – September 7, 2009 (Lévis Police Service)

I am honoured to be a part of the organizing committee for this service.  My colleagues and I look after the families of the officers who have lost a loved one, coordinating their attendance at the service and hosting a vigil for the families.  I know it is a small gesture to acknowledge the sacrifice, but I have seen that it helps the families left behind.  The service on Sunday is open to the public, and really is a wonderful tribute.

If you are downtown on Sunday morning, here is the schedule for the service:
9:00 a.m. – 10:00a.m. Reading of the entire Honour Roll of fallen officers at the Memorial Pavilion on Parliament Hill, West Corner.
10:00 a.m. Prelude by police choirs (steps in front of the Peace Tower).
10:20a.m. Police and Peace Officers’ Parade proceeds to Parliament Hill from Supreme Court of Canada, corner of Kent and Wellington.
11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. Memorial Service on Parliament Hill.

If you cannot attend, I hope that you take a moment to remember those who have paid the ultimate price to serve their communities.  More information on the service, including the names of all on the honour roll, see www.thememorial.ca.

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I know that summer has drawn to a close, and it is not just the cool air, leaves falling from the trees, or the calendar that tells me.  We’ve started to say goodbye to our summer friends.

A couple of weekends ago marked the end of year baseball tournament.  It was sad because we flamed out in a hurry on Saturday morning.  The loss was not the sad part, when you win two games all year it is somewhat expected. The sad part was that we didn’t get to spend the day with the team.  I look forward to that day filled with friends, playing ball and shooting the breeze.  Some of these people I consider to be among my closest friends, even though we see each other between May and September.  I won’t see most of them until spring now.

We’ve also noticed a decline in our weekly playgroup, as some of the children have started school now that they are old enough, and some are returning to school.  The weather has also played a factor here, as we have had a few gloomy mondays in a row, keeping us away from the park.

Our neighbourhood has also gotten quieter.  The neighbours don’t tend to hang around in laneways as much, so we speak to them less, and for shorter periods of time.  With the shorter, cooler days we aren’t at the park in the evenings much, and miss out on the other children and neighbours that we would see then.  We don’t even get to the park as often these days.

So we must look forward to the new friends, and reacquaint ourselves with our winter friends, the ones we see at hockey, gymnastics, and indoor playgroups, and the new ones that we will meet at the rink, the library, and other fun places that we will explore this fall and winter.

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Family Project

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I was going to write something light today, something silly and funny and not sad, but I can’t.  I am still sad.  Sad is ok, its normal and expected so I’ll try again tomorrow.

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