family

May Long Weekend: Holiday Recap


As some of you may remember, we took off for the May Long Weekend (aka Victoria Day Weekend) for British Columbia. Part of the holiday was spent at Rob’s mom’s place in Penticton, a curiously warm place that would blow away most American’s (not the intelligent or the well-traveled mind you, just everyone else) image of the Great White North as a semi-solid frozen version of northern Minnesota. 

We began the adventure in Jasper. We stayed overnight and ate breakfast Friday morning at the Soft Rock Cafe, which is the same place we ate breakfast on the day of our wedding almost a year ago. I enjoyed revisiting that place and those memories.

Friday was mainly spent on the road. Western Canada is vast. Holidaying by road involves hours and hours of driving. Getting to B.C. means traveling over the Canadian Rockies. I have been on two of the routes now. Over the Transcanada from Calgary and the Coquihalla from Kamloops. I prefer the latter. It is twined and a smoother ride but though it appears to be a safer drive too – mountain travel can be dangerous no matter the time of year. On our way back, we saw the remains of a mudslide that took the Transcanada out of commission for much of the weekend. By the time we hit the area, it was clear and traffic was flowing both ways but Rob didn’t want to tarry (not that you are allowed – mudslides are not photo ops people) because confidence was low that the highway would remain clear for long between the heavy snow melt and the rain.

Riding through the mountains is slowly becoming less of a bum-clenching experience. Canadians don’t do shoulders on their roads as a rule and the mountain highways are no exception though the Coquihalla is a bit better. Between the tight curves and the knee-high concrete jersey barriers to keep cars from tumbling off the road should they hit ice or simply take the corners too fast, it takes a while to get over the feeling that falling is imminent. Couple that with the, um, exuberant, driving of a substantial number of drivers and it would be easy to succumb to hysterical passenger seat driving. As it is, I merely adopt my zen face and phantom brake when the need arises.

Penticton is a retirement/summer tourist town sandwiched mainly between Skaha Lake and Lake Okanagan. The latter is the home of the legendary Ogopogo, a Loch Ness monster relative that I haven’t seen on either of my trips. My mother-in-law is a very sweet and wonderful person who talks more than my five year old and laments her lack of cycling opportunities and buddies. Motorcycling that is. On a Harley. She lives in a over 55 only block of two bedroom condos that is just a few blocks from the downtown. It’s really very nice. A person could walk everywhere and given the lack of anything that approaches a real winter, I could see myself living there easily. Which is what my MIL feverently hopes with every visit we make. She spends a lot of time talking Rob’s ear off about the “wonders” of Penticton.

It’s not paradise though. I did mention it was a tourist mecca in the summer? They swarm and menace like hornets. The town fills to the overflow parking lots and everything that is truly garish, lemming-like and benignly evil flourishes. We could only live there if we lived outside the boundaries and had a Costco membership, so we could supply ourselves to outlast the tourists and not have to venture away from our cozy acerage until school starts up again in September.

There were very few tourists this weekend. May Long Weekend is still a bit early for the hardcore flip-flip and swimsuit as daily wear crowd. But the casino was hopping (yes, casino – what is up with the need to build one of those on every body of water in North America?), and the homeless were everywhere.

On my first visit to Penticton I learned that warmer Canadian climates had large populations of homeless. Penticton is part of the norm in that respect. They are everywhere and honestly, I don’t feel all that safe walking alone through the downtown early morning or evening. Perhaps I should be more charitable but most homeless are so because of mental health issues or addictions and nice as they may be, these are not little things and people have to realize that care must be taken.

Between the casino, the few clubs and the homeless, the downtown smells like urine. More so now that it is warming up. All the more reason to take off one’s footwear when entering homes. The soles of our shoes are veritable toilets. 

Katy’s first beach visit was to Skaha Lake this weekend. She throughly enjoyed it. Ventured farther out into the water than I was comfortable and chafed herself good burying herself (with Rob’s help) in the sand.

“I am not going to bury myself again, Mama.”

Rob spent much of the visit hanging things and installing things and fixing computer issues. Number one son stuff and I have promised him that the most taxing thing he has to do when we visit my parents in June is hang out with my dad (and maybe help him sort through his menagerie of tools that have taken over the front of the garage since he fell ill almost three years ago now.

After Penticton, we headed up to Three Valley Gap near Revelstoke. It’s a family type resort of the non-stressing variety. There is a ghost town on site that boasts the largest roundhouse in North America with an accompanying assortment of decomissioned train cars including the infamous “finger car”. There is also quite the cool collection of mint condition cars dating from about 1903 to 1929. Fords mostly.

Nearby there is a place called the Enchanted Forest which was the brainchild of a woman who liked to create fanciful creatures and nursery rhytm characters out of concrete and place them in the wooded area around her home. Her husband bought the acreage area where they are set today and they created this fantasy land for children to wander about in, complete with tiny houses that my daughter delighted in to no end. There is a tree house that probably reaches a good three stories up and scenes from nearly every Mother Goose story I know. The only thing about the place that both Rob and I found odd was how surreal and creepy some of the creatures looked. Do you remember H.R. Puff n Stuff? Like that.

Aside from a bit of rain and mudslide alerts, the last leg of the holiday was good. However we all have sore bums and are glad to be home. (Oh yeah, and I smell like ass so I need to post this and hit the shower now with my apologies for not having all my links in yet. I will get them in the morning.) 

Cartoons, Commercials and Fat, Hairy Bastards


While I realize that advertisers aren’t specifically targeting my child above all other children, I wonder if somewhere in the ad world someone isn’t cackling like the Joker at parents who think they can shield their little ones from commercial TV. Unless you are rearing your offspring in RLDS compound in B.C. (because apparently U.S. officials have grown some cohones of late and are enforcing law down that way), odds are good that at some point your child will watch television the way God intended for it to be watched – and that is chuck full of enticing advertisements.

Over our last holiday in the States, my husband and I took advantage of the fact that our little girl prefers to stay with her grandparents over us and we snuck off for a few days to honeymoon our brains out. She meanwhile played and ate and watched uber-amounts of TV with abandon at my folks’. Like the last time she slipped her leash (or we dropped it – semantics here), she indulged in all the cartoons she is not allowed to watch at home. Most of them are on the Cartoon Network and they are not inherently evil. They remind me quite a bit of the old Bugs Bunny stuff I watched at her age which was back in the day before they’d been sanitized and made over to the uptight standards of the PC. So much of it was over my head that I am fairly certain I suffered no lasting damage, and I can see that same type of adult humor in some of the shows Katy likes to watch with her cousins when we are not around. Some of the stuff is even kind of clever and watchable like Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. It even has old stuff I haven’t seen since I was wee like The Perils of Penelope Pitstop and Magilla Gorilla. And of course it has the classics including the original Justice League and Scooby Doo. Does it seem as though I might have watched too much TV as a child? I did. But I think if fueled my imagination more than it damaged it and I can see in Katy’s imaginary play that she is right as rain herself.

So why do Rob and I object to commercial television? It’s the commercial part, of course. Whenever we have visited my folks, Katy comes home with a list of things that we need though we don’t seem to have suffered much without prior to her discovery of our new needs. Last fall it was cereal.

“Some people buy those kinds of cereals, Mama,” she said as we walked through the breakfast aisle at Safeway.

“Which cereals?”

With a sweeping gesture “All the sugar ones that are bad for you.”

“I see and how do you know this?”

“I saw it at Grandma’s house.”

“Well, some people do but we don’t buy food just because we saw it on TV.”

This elicited quite the chuckle from an older woman who was pushing her cart by us during our exchange. Obviously a mom who thought I was taking the high ground without checking for back-up. But we don’t buy food because of commercials and Katy is well-versed in this now. Her last visit at Grandma’s also stirred up an urgent need for a game that consisted of a butterflies being projected into the air and caught by large nets and a Disney princess doll whose skirt changed color with a magic wand. The first was never discussed beyond “Hmm that’s interesting” and the latter was put on the Christmas list (this was in October) for further discussions with Santa.

This last trip found us lacking a Swifer for mopping the kitchen, some sort of fake cheese food called Cheese Me’s (as nearly as I can understand her) and something that she convinced herself she needs quite desperately – a Turtle tooth-tooth. 

“Brushing is boring, Mom, but not with the Turtle tooth-tooth. It plays music that goes up through your teeth and into your brain.”

“That can’t be a good thing,” was my husband’s first, last and only comment.

After a week of listening to Katy describe the delight of owning a tooth-tooth every night when she was forced to brush her teeth the “boring” way, I decided to google the darn thing. To my horror, it exists. It is an electric toothbrush that plays a single pop tune for two minutes and was designed by some well-intentioned (childless) dentist somewhere to get kids (and adults) to brush their teeth for the recommended two minutes of time it takes to throughly clean plaque and over crusted matter from our mouth. I played the commercial for my husband and he was appalled. More so when he saw that one of the songs was by Kiss and that Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons actually appeared in the web-based ad for their own tooth-tooth. 

“What fat hairy bastards they are now,” Rob was shocked. 

Whenever Katy talks about the tooth-tooth (it’s really called a Turbo Tooth Tunes), she lights up and dances about in glee. Though we have gotten her to agree that music being transported to her brain (the commercial actually shows this transfer of melody in a manner that causes me a bit of alarm) is probably not the healthiest thing for someone – she still wants a tooth-tooth. And I guess if the worst thing that results from her holidays with my folks, and their still quite liberal views of children and TV watching, is tooth brush lust – then we are pretty lucky parents.

Brood Brangelina


I used to read the celeb bashing news/blog Defamer quite a bit in the early widowed days. It was funny. Mean. Biting. Sarcastic. And really, really funny. Except for the grocery check-out displays of the obligatory mags designed to make me feel inferior and underprivileged in comparison to the rich and famous of the world (and whenever Rob visits WWTDD and reads me the more outrageous stuff), I don’t get much celeb news reverent or otherwise. However I was tag surfing here at WordPress and ran across a Defamer piece on Brad and Angie’s menagerie of wee ones that I had to share. Seems all is not peaceful or blended in a home with four very small children too closely spaced in age and acquistion. The boys fight and the girls fight and apparently all three of the adopted ones beat on the bio-baby. Not only that but in order to get a moment’s peace, Brad and Angie – the Dalia Lama eqvialents of parents – feed their children junk food! Makes you smile a bit, doesn’t it? To know that even parents with staff can’t crowd control any better than normal parents. What was really funny about the article was the comments. Most of the people replying shared stories of their own war-torn childhoods and sibling unrest. My own family is comprised of four children. We fall in a five year age span that conspired to make my mother’s life such that when warm weather finally arrived in the late spring, she would send us all outdoors as soon as breakfast was over and lock the screen doors, front and back, behind us. We were only allowed in to pee. If we needed water, there was a hose in the yard. At lunch she would call us to the picnic table and feed us sandwiches and kool-aid. Afterwards she would cart everything back inside along with anyone young enough to nap and the rest of us were locked out again until just before my father would get home from work. Nothing Brady Bunch or Mama Partridge about that. News that the oldest Jolie-Pitt son was beating on the younger reminded me of the many times I pummeled my little brother. Right up until the day he chased me through the house trying to poke me with a wooden pole attached to a flag we’d gotten for the fourth of July. I managed to slam my bedroom door shut just as he launched the thing at me javelin style. It drilled a hole right through the door. We covered it up with an Andy Gibb poster on one side and Shaun Cassidy on the other. It was a month or more before our mom discovered it and we were forced to confess to the hole’s origins. The hole is still there. My dad was too cheap to replace a whole door just for a little hole. Sibling spacing. A lesson for us all.