family

Weekend Before Christmas


It’s now late in the afternoon on the day before Christmas Eve, a mere 24 hours before the festivities begin in earnest, and only 4 presents are wrapped. Most of the groceries are purchased, but I haven’t looked up any recipes I need to prepare this faux Chinese dinner that Rob and I thought would be a good idea. The basement and Katy’s room is in complete disarray because Rob’s sister and her children are coming to visit and we needed to make room to put up the extra full-size bed downstairs and pull out the trundle in Katy’s room, not to mention the fact that both Farron and Jordan – and at least one additional cat and a large dog – will be staying over tomorrow night. Why do we feel compelled to begin huge projects on the eve of holidays or family visits? Is there some sort of compulsion that drives us? We probably are tormenting ourselves for naught. Shannon, my sister-in-law, hasn’t even given us an arrival date yet. Perhaps she will call from the road? She’s a widow too, which explains much to those of us “in the know”.

Yesterday we ventured over to the mega-mall to finish up our shopping. Next year we are vowing to start in September and do it all on line, but this Christmas we did the bulk out and about with the rest of humanity – literally it seemed. We made remarkable time. In and out in 90 minutes and found a spot to park in the lot to boot.

Last night was a Christmas party at friend’s of Rob’s, Dan and Heidi, whose oldest babysits for Katy. It was strange to do the holiday party thing again. Deja vu and not. I didn’t know a soul aside from Dan and his girls. Katy played upstairs with the other kids and I spent a bit of time chatting with a very young medical resident until I happened to mention our odd blended family and circumstances. I forget that I shouldn’t speak so casually about dead spouses because most people who know me even a little don’t know how to react, so forget about people I have only just met. She did find Rob and I to say good-bye when she and her husband left which I will take to mean I didn’t completely scare her off. At some point, as the kitchen filled up and spilled into the living room area Rob and I just cuddled up a bit on the sofa near the wood burning stove, watching the other guests get hammered. It was nice to have another wall-flower to hang with. At parties past, Will was always engaged with some person or other when he wasn’t manning the grill (yeah, even at the winter holiday parties) and he would always nag at me to mingle and not depend on him so much for company. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t know people and I did interact but I also hung back and watched – because that is who I am. It’s still who I am even though I am far less ill at ease in a room full of strangers than I have ever been in my life. As I told the young resident during our conversation, I have been surrounded by strangers, more or less, for the last six months. I did recognize a few of the women in attendance – from the gym and dance too, I think. I wasn’t keen on getting to close. I am leery of making friends with people when they are drinking heavily. You just never know how close they are at the moment to who they really are or not.

Today was our usual Sunday of a long breakfast, followed by tearing up the house and then public skating. Skating is starting to be a family ritual. Even when it feels like a chore or interruption in the day, it is nice to get the heart pumping and feel the chill of the ice seep up from your toes. We had tea, hot chocolate and cookies when we got home. Another ritual. That’s what it’s all about in the end. Family and friends and the rituals that hold us together.

House Guests


Rob and Katy discovered a family of kitties yesterday evening. The mother cat has been roaming about the neighborhood for a few weeks. Our neighbor, Charlotte, took to feeding her eventually, and I guess that was enough hospitality to convince her to move her newborns to a spot behind some stacked boards next to our garage. The kittens have only just opened their eyes, and they wobble when they attempt to walk. Rob moved some of the plywood and found a cardboard box into which he put an old blanket to make a better nest for the young family as they were living on a bed of rock. We haven’t seen any posters up for a lost cat, so the mother could be local or, more likely, abandoned in the near past as she is very tame. She will eat right out of your hand and comes when you call her. Katy has been lobbying for a pet for over a year now. She has stepped up her efforts a bit since we moved up here, but we have held her off with time vague promises of a pet sometime in the future. The main reason for this is that she is too young to really take care of an animal. That would fall to me, and Rob is worried that I wouldn’t take to it well. Also, Rob is a tiny bit happy to be pet-free after years of cats and dogs. Jordan took the last animal, her cat Tigger, with her when she moved this last June. Another cat, Nike, and a yellow lab named Loki live in the city with Farron. One of Katy’s arguments for a pet is that she is the only sister who doesn’t have a cat. Nothing escapes that child’s notice and she can be quite clever. She began one of her pet campaigns by sitting Rob down one day and saying in a calm, matter of fact way, “ Can we talk about a dog?” She would be happy with either a cat or a dog, but for the moment she is leaning more towards dog because she is convinced they would play with her more. This was pre-kittens though. The gray mama has already seemed to have decided to call our yard home. The kittens will probably go feral at some point without intervention. Rob isn’t inclined to intervene much beyond the home he fashioned for them and some leftover cat food in a leftover dog dish for the mama. Fate has its own ideas though I have come to realize, and certainly a sense of humor that you can appreciate or resent depending on your world view. Nothing is decided, but, for the moment, we have cats.
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Drumheller


Today we visited the Royal Tyrrell Museum located in the Drumheller Valley in the town of Drumheller. It’s located in the southern Alberta in a place called the Badlands. The museum was named after J.B. Tyrrell,  who in his search for coal deposits along the river, discovered a skull of a dinosaur. which is known today as the Albertasaurus. Tyrrell’s discovery marked the beginning of the collection of dinosaur remains. Drumheller itself was named after one it’s early settlers, Samuel Drumheller in 1913. Until the gas and oil boom of the 1980’s, Drumheller was one of the fastest growing places in Alberta. Today though it survives mainly on tourism and has a population of about 8,000. 

 

The museum is nestled in and area of steep, dry coulees ridged with the strata caused by hundreds of years of erosion. Even though the climate changes that are slowly changing the weather patterns here are effecting the coulees by providing enough moisture to allow plant life to grow where there once was none, they are still very beautiful, like an earth tone rainbow. It’s not really that large. There is a main building with exhibit areas, a cafeteria, an indoor garden and a learning center. The surrounding coulees can be climbed via stairs to an observation deck and there are trails in the area as well.

 

Katy is not quite as dinosaur crazy as my oldest nephew was at her age, but ever since her preschool teacher introduced her class to dinosaurs over a year ago, she has taken an interest that goes beyond the cursory. She even went to a dinosaur session of kindercamp this summer and still dresses like a pterodactyl from time to time when she isn’t dressed up as a princess or a ballerina. She can tell you how pterodactyls are birds really, and how some dinosaurs evolved into the birds we know today. It’s her favorite dinosaur though she likes T-Rex’s too. She had a pretty good time, I think. It’s hard to tell with young children in museums. The good thing about taking them with you is that is that it relieves you of the feeling that since you spent the money to come in, you should read everything at every exhibit. Having a child along allows you to just “look at the pictures” so to speak. We didn’t arrive there until late in the afternoon, so it wasn’t very crowded though that might have had more to do with the rain and the chilly temps than the time. We wandered for a couple of hours. Bought the obligatory  “I came, I saw, I got the t-shirt” for Katy and headed for home about six.

 

The drive was a long one and we didn’t get back until close to ten. Cranky, hungry child and slightly overtired husband, but all in all a really good day.