It's October Eve and here I am finally blogging about the rest of my trip to Canada...in August. To be fair, I only got back a month ago today and somehow September has been a doozy of a month!
On the morning of August 26, we walked to the park to meet up with some friends. Notice the nice wide boulevard between the sidewalk and the road (oh, don't I wish we had those around here)?
"Om-nom-nom-nom-nom!" Phoebe told me.
"You're hungry?" I asked.
"Yuppo!" she said.
She used to always say "yes" (with a little lisp, so more like "yeth") and some times "yup" or (for whatever reason) "bahm." Recently she's added a little "Yuuuuppo!" to her repertoire and it's ridiculously cute.
"Would you like a snack?"
"Yeah!"
"And what would you like for a snack?"
"Peach! Peach!" she sang. "Want peach! Want! Peach!"
"A peach?" I said. "Well, okay! Let's get a peach for you."
"Black peach," she told me seriously. "Black, black. Peach. Black. Black peach. Black, black, black."
Because there are so many tricky consonants in there, however, all her blacks came out as "blatt" and all her peaches came out as "each," so it was "Blatt each. Blatt, blatt. Each. Blatt. Blatt each. Blatt, blatt, blatt."
"You want a...black...peach?"
"Yeth!" she said enthusiastically.
"Well, let's...just...see what we can do about that," I said, quite unsure of how I would fulfill such a request.
We went over to our fruit and she quickly found a bag of plums.
"Blatt each!" she squealed. "See? Blatt each!"
"Oh! You want a plum!" I chuckled at the clever way she'd worked through her little lexical gap. "These are called plums. They kind of look like black peaches, though, don't they?"
"Blatt each! Cut! Cut!"
"Sure, I can cut one up for you."
While I busied myself doing that, Phoebe helped herself to a whole entire apple. She is always getting into something.
Yesterday I looked into Marshmallow's habitat and she was...acting strange. I alerted Benjamin to this fact and he checked on her, refreshed her water, and found some grubs to see if he could tempt her to eat. She seemed to perk up a bit and was hopping around for awhile. However, when we returned from our walk, we found Benjamin sobbing on the couch.
Marshmallow had died while we were out and Benjamin was, in Zoë's words, inconsolable.
What I really wanted to do yesterday was go hiking, but we're all trying to get over a cold and I was really much too sick to actually go hiking. This illness seems to be different from the little cough we all had last week (and no one over here has tested positive for COVID), involving just a sore throat, full body aches and only a minimal fever, if any.
I was having a body achey day yesterday, so hiking wouldn't have necessarily been a good option. But for some reason I felt building furniture would be??
I recently finished reading Beehive Girl, which was a charming and quick read. The author is a young little thing—who has her PhD and one baby—and reading and trying to relate to her story felt like the time my friend Amanda pointed out that we were living life "in reverse" of each other when I started graduate school, having already birthed my passel of children, while she was getting ready to have her first, having already finished with graduate school.
There were a few things I would have questioned as an editor (though I was not the editor for this particular book, which is through BCC Press, where I've done a smidge of editing), such as when she made a claim that she was worried about ticks dropping from the trees. She's a biologist so I felt like that could have been researched a little better (ticks do not drop from trees; I don't care how many born-and-bred Southerners or New Englanders or what have you might tell you otherwise).
But that mistake was one I was able to swallow pretty easily and overall it was just a quick, charming read (as previously mentioned).
I appreciated her optimism, which at times I even felt was tinged with hubris. For example, one of the first big projects she discusses is "making a piece of furniture." At first she selected a rather expensive and complicated toy box system that her aunt/mentor ends up talking her out of in favour of a cubby/bench system that required less wood and less work. She allotted a single day to construct this piece of furniture from the ground up, having never used any sort of power tools, and also driving for, like, six hours!
Needless to say, she did not finish her project in a single afternoon (and then hilariously—and tragically—relates how her car broke down on the way home so she ended up having to return to her aunt's house to spend the night with her baby and ended up with the stomach flu as well, embarrassingly vomiting on the kitchen floor).
So, I mean...she typically got humbled pretty quick when she was too ambitious with her plans. And who hasn't started a 5-minute project that turns into 3 hours...that turns into 3 days...that turns into 3 weeks...
Andrew and I have certainly tackled many a project with a bit too much confidence. On the one hand, these projects have taught us that we lack many basic fix-it skills. On the other hand, these projects have taught us a lot of basic fix-it skills that we previously lacked.
Learning is messy and slow. And that's okay.
Either this week was terribly busy or we've just gotten so used to having Andrew home most of the time that it feels oppressive when he has to work and commute every day. In addition to jury duty (to which he was summoned for—and then released from—on Wednesday morning), Andrew had a number of meetings that he had to go to campus for. He ended up being on campus on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, with the jury selection on Wednesday. So we're pretty much worn out this week!
Our neighbours have the funnest little bubble station. They can often be found blowing bubbles and are so welcoming to anyone who wants to join them. Janelle rests a plastic lid on top of a cooler. She has a little dish for bubbles and some wonderful bubble wands and doesn't seem to mind that the kids spill all over the place (which is something that stresses me out to no end). She just appreciates having kids over to play with her little boy so she can kick up her heels for a minute (and she sets out camping chairs for all the parents so they can join her for a chat while the kids play).
For the life of me, I can't remember the title of this particular book...but years ago we read a story that talked about a child growing up and the changes that happened. One day this child "climbed the mountain of cooked carrots," meaning that they gained the ability to eat their vegetables without complaining. The book wasn't remotely about carrots, but this is the line that my kids clung to. Benjamin started ribbing Zoë about her dislike for cooked carrots (and pretty much everything on the face of the planet) and Zoë got upset that he was teasing her.
And then one day she ate some roasted carrots and found them to be quite palatable and Benjamin exclaimed that she had finally "climbed the mountain of cooked carrots!"
That's precisely why it takes a lot of tasting to decide whether or not you actually like things.
It was very convenient that—after 37 years or so of refusing to eat tomatoes—Andrew realized that tomatoes are good on some things...like sandwiches. The kids learned that even grown ups can expand their preferences!
We've been trying all sorts of unusual (to us) foods: dragon fruit, star fruit, papaya, guava, eggplant. Mushrooms don't quite fall into the same kind of exotic categories these other foods might fall into, but it's also not something that typically lands on our weekly shopping list, either. Benjamin is always begging for mushrooms and sometimes Andrew will oblige him. This week was one of those weeks.
Benjamin was very excited. A few of our other kids—including Zoë—were not.
For lunch the other day, Benjamin sautéed some mushrooms to put on his Ramen and I told him just to cook the entire package (because once you open a pack of mushrooms they tend to...wilt...or whatever...quite quickly). I had some with my noodles as well. And to my surprise when Benjamin offered Zoë some she said she would try one and then would see if she wanted more.
So she ate one, declared it delicious, and then ate two servings of them! And not mixed in with her soup or anything, but just...plain, on a little plate. It was quite surprising!
Today when Benjamin put the leftover sautéed mushrooms on some leftover "essential" birthday pizza...Zoë did the same thing.
Not only has she climbed the mountain of cooked carrots, she's schlepped through the swamp of sautéed mushrooms as well!
*****
Now I'm going to talk about soup for a minute because putting mushrooms into my soup at lunch the other day reminded me that mushroom flavoured Ramen used to be quite normal in my house growing up. Beef, chicken, mushroom, oriental...all normal flavours.
From what I'm reading, "oriental" flavour has—rightly—been changed to "soy sauce" flavoured. Calling a food oriental is a little...orientalistic.
But I'm having a hard time rewiring my brain to stop calling Ramen "oriental noodles" since that is—by and large—still what Ramen is called in Canada (as evidence: this blog post from 2019 and this short film from 2018). That's what I grew up calling it, with an alternative being "ichiban" (which is part of a brand name for noodles, and which simply means 'the best' in Japanese (or, like, "first")).
I remember visiting my cousins in the states once and they asked if I wanted some Top Ramen for lucnh and I was like, "What is this thing of which you speak?"
I had no idea what they were talking about because I had never used the word "ramen" in my life.
Sapporo Ichiban: Japanese-style Noodles? Yes.
Mr. Noodles: Instant Noodles? Yes.
No Name Brand: Oriental Noodles? Yes.
But I had never come across the word "ramen."
"You know—ramen! Like 'Top Ramen!'"
"Yeah, no...I don't know what 'Top Ramen' is, so..."
They produced a package and I was like, "Oh, you mean..."
And then I'm sure I said "oriental noodles."
Now, to my mind these days, that title sounds far too orientalistic (as I mentioned) and I've largely adopted the use of "ramen noodles" instead, but I do wonder how to change an entire culture. Like, "oriental noodles" is printed on the food packages. There are many restaurants with "oriental noodles" in the name. Is it something that needs to be changed? Or is it, culturally, okay? I don't even know!
Where I grew up there was a rather large Asian population. Vancouver's population is about 20% Chinese (or Chinese-heritage). Combined with South Asian (14.2%), Filipino (5.5%), Korean (2.4%), West Asian (2.5%), Southeast Asian (2.2%) and Japanese (1.2%) populations, that puts the Asian population at 47.6% of Vancouver residents. 43% of Vancouver residents are considered "European" (which is how we would be identified if we lived there). So...there are a lot of Asians in that area of Canada and that's where I grew up with "oriental noodles."
To put that in perspective for my children, we feel like there is a large Asian population here in Atlanta (which is a pretty popular place for Korean diaspora to land), but Atlanta's population is only 5% Asian (a category containing Chinese (0.7%), Korean (0.8%), Vietnamese (0.7%) and Indian 1.5%).
To be fair, in the mid-1990s, the European population in Vancouver was approximately 67%, while the Asian population was "merely" 27% or so. That still blows Atlanta's 5% out of the water.
And that's fine. I'm not calling Atlanta homogenous by any means. It just happens that the Pacific Northwest has a large population of Asian immigrants (so I grew up using chopsticks but, like, couldn't purchase tortillas in a grocery store because Vancouver has only 1.4% of a Latin American population today (and a mere 0.76% in mid-1990s)), whereas Atlanta's Hispanic population is about 10% (Salt Lake City is about 20%, Los Angeles is about 50%). And Atlanta is, you know, like 32% Black, whereas Vancouver is only 1.6% Black (today; but only 0.2% Black when I was growing up).
All this is to say that somehow in a place with a relatively large Asian population, I grew up calling Ramen "oriental noodles" and I'm just not sure how I feel about that, precisely.
It stormed pretty hard last night—not so much that it flooded the basement or anything, but still pretty stormy. I listened to the rain as drifted in and out of sleep while I fought with Phoebe about whether or not we should be sleeping (guess who was on which side of that argument). I woke up to the unmistakable THOOM of the power going out and thought about checking on the basement...but Phoebe was asleep right beside me and I figured pretty much anything of value had already been moved out of the path of the flood, anyway.
The power came back on around 5:00 in the morning, by my calculations (from information gathered from the flashing alarm clock, which alerted me of precisely how many hours had passed since it turned back on). We woke up in the morning and began our rush to get ready for church—stuffing the children into their Sunday best, filling their bellies with breakfast, brushing their hair and their teeth.
We were right in the thick of it when we realized no one had seen Benjamin.
He wasn't in his bed. He wasn't downstairs playing LEGO. He wasn't answering the full-house announcement. Had he gone outside?
His shoes were all inside and the front door was locked. Perhaps he'd gone out the garage door...but that door was locked, too...
Fortunately, checking the garage door led Andrew past the couch, where he found Benjamin sound asleep. He woke up very disoriented and spoke nonsense for a good ten minutes before he finally woke up enough to eat breakfast and get dressed. It was really quite concerning, so we were glad he snapped out of it.
Once he was dressed, he went to wait in the van while we put some finishing touches on the other kids and gathered up items for my church bag and collected all our sheet music and hymnals and...I was just putting on my cute little fall booties for the first time this season when my phone buzzed. It was a message from Grandpa:
"Church is canceled."
"Oh. Why?" I asked. "Power outage?"
"Yep."
Summer is waning, but we've had a few good pool days in September so far.
This is the picture I snapped of the Happy Face Barn (outside of Cayley, Alberta) on the way back to High River from Grassy Lake.
Yescherday was the co off. It was loud eaven thou I made some new frends at the co off. It was at the church. It was a bit to loud for me. Mom siad she sind up for Ben and Zoë. When I was in my clas it was qwit, like really qwite. I loved it so much. The end.
This morning Alexander was unpacking the dishwasher when he came across the cheese grater. In the past, this was an item that he left for someone else to do since it's kind of sharp and is complicated to put away. Today, however, he told me how he's becoming a Big Boy and knows where everything in the house goes, so he'd be able to put the grater away himself (it goes in one of the upper cabinets).
He went on to tell me how sometimes Phoebe likes to help him put away dishes, but he doesn't always love that because Phoebe doesn't always put things away in the right places. She'll put bowls with the plates and forks in the junk drawer. And that's frustrating because it ultimately makes more work for him. I commiserated with him (because—oh!—if it ain't a gospel truth that teaching children to work is often more work than simply doing the work by yourself) but explained that it's important that we left Phoebe help...even though she creates a little chaos in the process.
To be fair to Phoebe, she is growing up to be a Big Girl and knows where practically everything in the house goes as well. Just the other day she wanted me to help her with a snagged fingernail and I told her it was one that I had better no rip off. We'd need the fingernail clippers for this one!
"Nail! Nail! Nail!" she repeated.
"In a minute," I told her. "I can go get the nail clippers as soon as I'm finished here."
She put two and two together and headed for the stairs.
"Get! Get! Get!" she sang as she climbed up.
She returned with the fingernail clippers and so I paused what I was doing (for transparency sake: playing a game of Shanghai Rummy...) and gave her a little manicure right then and there.
In an effort to keep her occupied away from our game for a moment longer, Andrew suggested that she go put the fingernail clippers back.
"Oh, no, no, no!" I said. "These are the good nail clippers from our bathroom drawer. I want to put them back there myself. She might be trusted to retrieve the nail clippers from their spot, but I don't think we can trust her to put them back in their assigned location. Who knows where they'd end up?!"
In retrospect, I should have been more forthright with Heather about our accommodations while we were in Canada. To be fair to myself, I was experiencing some insecurities regarding my likability* when I reached out to her to ask if I could stay with her while I was in Canada and, unfortunately, she and her parents and sister had reservations to camp at Waterton the very week I was due to be in Canada.
She didn't know how desperate I was for accommodations and I was too insecure to say, "Hey! Take care of me for a minute!" So neither one of us thought to suggest that I just...housesit...for her! That would have solved all my problems!
When she drove me to the airport on Wednesday morning (spoilers!), she was like, "Nancy! I should have just given you guys the code to my house! You could have stayed there while I was away! It wouldn't have been a problem at all!"
In fact, Heather was so sweet that when I asked her if I (and my children) could spend the night at her place on Tuesday evening and have her drive me/us to the airport on Wednesday morning, so immediately said yes.
Then apparently she turned to her mom and said, "I just said Nancy and her kids could spend the night at my place on Tuesday, but...where will I put them?"
Her mom reminded her that her camper would be sitting in her driveway so (spoilers!) I ended up sleeping in the camper with not one, not two, but five little girls! (Miriam slept inside with Sadie and Miley, so I had three of Heather's girls with me and two of my own, and Heather didn't lie—that bed in her camper is really comfortable!)
She didn't even hesitate. She just said, "Of course!" and then bothered about the details, like determining where we might sleep...and informing her husband, who has been working on advanced certifications for his pilot's license (he's already a pilot but is getting extra certifications) and who she hadn't seen for a week and who was due to arrive home on Tuesday evening that, well, he'd have a house full of company to greet him in addition to his wife and his girls. And do you know how Ryan responded to this news?
By bringing home a little packages of airplane biscuits for the kids.
When he walked in the door he presented them to his daughters, who immediately started squealing with glee while also calling out, "The cousins! The cousins! Did you bring some for the cousins?!"
"I brought enough for everyone," Ryan assured them, handing biscuits to my children as well.
He's definitely the calming presence in that house, perfectly complimenting Heather's natural rambunctiousness. But she is such a fun and loving and patient mother! It was fun to spend some time with her and I so appreciate how graciously they hosted us.
But, before I knew I'd be spending the night at Heather's house on Tuesday, we had arranged to meet her down in Waterton on Sunday. Waterton is a national park in southern Alberta that abuts Glacier National Park in Montana (together they comprise an international peace park).
We went to Emerald Bay on Waterton Lake, to splash and kayak and sit and visit.
When we were deciding where to go, Heather asked, "Are your kids allowed to swim-swim on Sundays?"
We don't have a problem with that in our household, though I know that Andrew's family did while growing up (though to be fair, when Grandma and Grandpa took our kids to Grover the year I was too pregnant with Alexander and Zoë was too sick and Andrew was too out-of-town to join them...they also let the kids swim on Sunday)! Karen texted me to say that they "did NOT let the kids swim in Lake Powell this afternoon." And later Shayla tagged me in this picture on Facebook:
Our plane landed in Calgary around 4:00 in the afternoon. My mom had arrived at the airport at around 3:00 to pick us up, and then we were just about the last people off the plane, and then we had to stop to use the potties, so by the time we made it out to my mom she felt like she had been waiting forever!
But the nice thing was that she was waiting beside another lady, whose family members were on the same flight as us. They had been talking, and when the other party finally arrived, they said their goodbyes and my mom said something about how she hoped her daughter and children would be coming soon.
"Oh, was it a mom traveling with three girls—a big one, a medium-sized one, and a little one?"
"Yes!" my mom said.
"I was sitting behind them!" the woman said. "They were all so well-behaved!"
That was a nice thing to hear!
We first went to get settled into our hotel, and then headed into downtown Calgary to meet up with Auntie Abra & Brady and Piper & Anton. Piper had offered to host a little dinner at her apartment's recreation room. She even let us swim in the pool, which was nice (though her pool was freezing cold, Piper had brought a bunch of pool noodles and squirt guns and balls and things which we appreciated getting to use)!
After we were finished swimming, we went to the rec room where Abra brought her kitten Padme. We had fun watching her hop all around the room:
David was able to drive down to Okotoks with Millie to meet up with us on our last day in Alberta. We just met at Big Rock Elementary School (because in Alberta it's normal to use the school playground equipment outside of school hours (unlike out here where they lock up the school playgrounds and put threatening signs up on the fences about trespassing)). School hadn't yet started for the kids when we were up there, so the school grounds were empty and available.
It was fun for the little girls to play together again. It sure was hard to catch a picture of them together, though! They're both such busy little climbers that it was hard to catch both their faces in the same frame—up, down, around and around! I'll post this picture of Millie and Phoebe together since there aren't any identifying characteristics in this picture, but this is how most pictures turned out, with one girl facing the camera and the other not:
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Andrew, Andrew, Andrew...you had one job to do while I was away.
One. Job.
I asked him to hold down the fort. That's it!
And just look at this mess!
