Page 64 of 524

A Prairie Wife Kind of Day


Photographed by Kenneth Chan. youngjediboy@hot...

Image via Wikipedia

Except for the sleeping until nearly noon, it was a farm wife on the little prairie day. Rob rescued our pitiful potato crop on Friday and they needed to be turned into delicious meals before they rotted.

I began the process yesterday afternoon with stock pot full of potato soup. I outdid myself. It was soup for which to die. However, I put barely a dent in the potato stash and so determined to make another pot today for the freezer and turn the rest into delicious breadstuffs.

It’s not fun. Gardening, harvesting or transforming. I am left with little doubt as to why women abandoned the kitchen and cooking in droves as soon as technology, cultural norms and the fast food industry made it possible for them to do so. I am fortunate that I have a husband who doesn’t believe that all things drudgery is women’s work. I experimented with a new soup recipe yesterday and found a way to turned mashed potatoes into tasty buns today, and he dug in, peeled and diced while I made everything else “so”. We are a team like that. Slightly awesome to behold if I do say so.

Before we started, a trip to town was necessary. Hard as it is for me to wrap my mind around, we don’t have enough Tupperware for freezing.

“Canadian Tire or Walmart?” I asked.

Unless we make for the edges of the city or the city itself, our shopping venues are quite limited in The Fort, which is the one thing I don’t like about it. I have no idea why the town council thinks young families would want to settle a place with overpriced, poorly constructed home and zero convenience and ease of shopping when they could find better, cheaper options closer to the heart of the city? But I digress and will leave the puzzlement of the town’s management for another day.

“I guess we should patronize Canadian businesses,” he said and so Canadian Tire it was.

Known generally as Crappy Tire, it has its niche in automotive parts and sporting goods, but it’s no Target.

I haven’t been in since the remodel, which consists of mainly rearranging where is what – something that doesn’t endear a store to me in the slightest. They did nothing about the faded worn feel of the place or to fix the fact that even with a dozen easy to access employees walking around, no one has the any idea what you are talking about when you ask them questions and fewer of them know where specific stock is housed without needing to contact a supervisor.

Tupperware, a new bread maker and Christmas decorations later, we were on our way to tea, slushies and home. Seldom do we indulge in the North America Sunday consuming rituals, so it’s a novelty when we do.

I am not done with the wifery. There is bread to make tomorrow. I am okay with baking. It’s not the worst thing about being a homemaker. That would be cleaning. Not the daily tidy up, but the deep sanitizing/dusting stuff. Baking does shoot your day to shit however, but the oven time part does facilitate writing pretty well.

The day ends with Rob on his knees grouting. The kitchen is about three steps away from done done, which makes this Prairie wife’s day.

 

 

* Just five more days of this mom blog contest thing. I’m precariously perched in the 6th spot and honestly, to get the maximum mileage out of being linked in the list – I need to be in the top five. When the site promotes the list, it only shows the top five and you have to click-through to see the others, which I am guessing doesn’t happen a lot. So to get to the fifth spot – I need more votes. 25 or so to catch or just overtake her. If you care to help out, click here. Remember you can vote daily and more than once if you have a smart phone and a work computer. Thanks!

Related articles

Forgot How Hard This Was


The Gazing Nude.Emmanuel Marcou

Image via Wikipedia

I haven’t tried to blog every day in eons, so I’d forgotten how hard it was to do. Consider my lack of interest in gazing at my own naval unless I happen to be on a yoga mat,the fact that I’ve kept it up is astounding me – if no one else. The fact remains though that I just don’t need to angst over the minutia of life or create issue from detail. Not anymore anyway.

And technically, I am blogging twice a day because yesterday, I posted original material to the BlogHer site as well as here, which is not exactly what a great many bloggers do. Take for example the mom blog that is whooping bum at the Canada Mom blogs competition*.  It’s an aggregator serving as a community events page for the most part. Not much content and this is another reason to be pleased with myself, even if I am going to barely maintain a spot in the top ten list there.

More spectacularly is that I have finally gotten around to taking an online writing class in addition and the extra hours pounding at the keyboard are showing and not just in my sore achy forearms because I am getting back into the habit of outlining and drafting, which is something that bloggers don’t really have cause to do. Progress is being made with my voice and technique though I sadly remain an indifferent speller and more fond of punctuation’s eye-herding and melodic usages than what the moldy oldy Strunk and White have to say (and the irony of White pontificating about punctuation still amuses me).

If I were really ambitious, I’d start up the yoga blog again too, but I am not really ambitious. That’s my eternal issue. My inner Annie has never seen the need to work myself like a rented mule even if there was a really good reason to do so, and there never really is. Work should never crowd out life or even compete with it seriously. I suppose one could argue that I chose teaching for this reason, and you’d be mostly correct except that I also had to be freakishly good at it. The big bonus of being a teacher was that it came to me easily so, unlike some, I didn’t have to take it home with me after the first few years.

But it’s late, this post will just come in under the wire for the day. It was a big day. Potato soup. Which was excellent. Herding a child to soccer practice and enduring a spur of the moment play date sans benefit of sleeping in and snow. It has finally snowed.

Tomorrow is another day. Perhaps more interesting and then again maybe not. But I will blog. And again the day after. Twice daily until the end of the month. A modest ambition and just maybe, ambition can be cultivated.

* Just an fyi, thanks to all that have voted in the last two days, I am back in 7th place and have a shot at 6th if I can snag another 20 votes. If you are inclined, you can vote daily by just clicking here. Six more days and then we are done with this – I promise.

Ten Years Ago Today


Oocyte viewed with HMC

Image via Wikipedia

Ten years ago today, I conceived. It’s an odd thing to be able to pin down the conception of one’s child to practically the minute, but on this day all those years ago, the doctor harvested my eggs, the late husband contributed his “sample” and wee daughter’s existence began later that afternoon.

It was a not overly climatic end to a nearly two year oydessey that I would wish on no one.

When at first we had no luck getting pregnant, the doctors suspected that I was “to blame”. A natural assumption given that I was 36 and Will just 26. It’s helped along by the fact that women are nearly always the go-to in the infertility blame department despite the fact that the reasons for infertility problems are split pretty evenly between husband and wife, we women shoulder most of the heavy lifting.

Our issue was him, however, and in an ironic twist, the only medical fix was to put me through the grueling IVF protocol. I was then, and still am a bit, resentful of the fact that most infertility treatments are aimed at the female, whether it’s good for her or not. We could have much more inexpensively opted for artificial insemination using donor sperm. That was my choice because it meant that all I needed to do was monitor my cycle and show for inseminating when I was ovulating. No injections to kill to stop and then start my cycle up again. No egg harvesting. No egg reinsertion. Much less fuss, muss and upset of my hormones and plumbing.

But Will balked and I gave in because I figured that it didn’t matter as long as we got a bundle of joy at the end of it all.

The first IVF failed and I was ready to give up and move on to other options, but Will wasn’t. His family was very anti-adoption, but in that polite way of people who truly believe that it’s a second-rate way to build a family and probably God’s way of de-selecting people who shouldn’t be parents in the first place. But these types are too Christian to say so out loud. They simply make faces and not quite objectionable asides during the course of conversations. I remember mentioning the possibility of adopting to my mother-in-law and the look of distaste on her face made me sorry I hadn’t thought to vet my future in-laws as well as I had my mate.

Not this his need to cow-tow to his family’s prejudice’s at my physical expense was not a sore point.

Being adopted, I found his mother’s white trash horror of it irritating. Even taken the notable dysfunction of my own family into account, I couldn’t see where shared DNA had benefited her or her late husband’s family much at all, but the extended family’s cold reception of adoption was not what put it off the table. What doomed it was the cost, the waiting periods and the fact that there was no better guarantee it would result in a child than medical intervention would.

“Just one my round,” he said. “It’ll work this next time, I know it.”

It wasn’t as though I didn’t believe him, but the IVF protocol wreaked havoc on my system even though the doctors had me on the lowest doses of everything. My hips and inner thighs were solid bruises and the hormone overdose made me feel as though I was coming out of my skin, and even though I lack solid proof – I am certain that one of the medications is the root of knee issues that have just worsened over time.

In the end, I only agreed to try again after extracting a promise from him that if it didn’t work, he would agree to allow me to try insemination with donor sperm.

So on November 11th of 2001, we drove my painfully swollen self up to the hospital and tried again. I was so nervous and apprehension about another failed round that I refused to discuss the possibility that it would work with anyone. Even a week later, sick with hyper ovaries and already a bit green and nauseous, I wouldn’t allow myself to be drawn into any happy baby talk.

It wasn’t until well after he was diagnosed and dying that I ran across information that confirmed the source of his fertility issues was tied to his illness. Our not being able to get pregnant was actually one of the first missed clues on the road to his terminal diagnoses.

Ten-year anniversaries are considered milestones and that’s likely why those long ago days are on my mind a bit today. I am lucky to have wee Dee, who is less “wee” by the day, and to have moved on to a new life, but the old one always lurks a bit and sometimes asks to be remembered and recognized.

 

* Six more days til the voting for Top Canada Moms Blog contest ends. Needing votes to hang in there, so to speak. Just a click. Nothing more. Thanks.

 

Related articles