Three’s a Crowd

  • Saturday night special.

    Growing up, one of my least favourite home-cooked meals was spaghetti and meat sauce.

    Dubbed “Saturday night special” more than twenty years ago by my dad, spaghetti and meat sauce was a staple dinner in our house. With the benefit of adult hindsight, it genuinely isn’t that bad – it’s pretty hard to ruin pasta, ground beef, and tomato sauce, and my mom isn’t a bad cook.

    As a teenager, I hated it.

    I hated it straight off the stove at dinner time. I hated it after four hours of congealing in the microwave, waiting for me to come home from work and eat it. I hated it on Saturdays, and on every other day of the week it landed on the table. Much like green eggs and ham, there was nowhere and no way I wanted to eat Saturday night special.

    I couldn’t understand why my mom continued to make it. It was clear that I didn’t like it (sorry, Mom!), and it wasn’t like it was anybody else’s favourite dish either, as far as I could see. She made a fabulous penne and meatballs dish – why not make that?

    When I moved out, I promised myself I was done with spaghetti and meat sauce. I love pasta, and my cupboard always had a good stock of rotini, ziti, macaroni, penne, rigatoni, and farfalle in it in the early years of my marriage. But never spaghetti.

    Eventually, when we switched grocery stores and my pasta options became a bit more limited, I started buying spaghetti. It was cheap, and it’s not like the shape changed the taste. I’d do it with olive oil and parmesan like I did other pasta, but never with tomato sauce. I was still determined that Saturday night special would never make an appearance on my table.

    And then, one night about six months ago, staring into my cupboards with the age-old question What can I make for dinner? cycling through my head, three kids yelling at each other in the background and thirty minutes or less to get dinner on the table, I caved. The box of spaghetti was sitting right there, with its cheerful “Ready in 8 minutes!” label on the side of the packaging. The shelf below had jars of tomato sauce, ready to go.

    With no small amount of self reflection, I grabbed the spaghetti and the tomato sauce and got to work. Twenty minutes later, as I put bowls of spaghetti and tomato sauce down on the table and called the kids in for dinner, Bea came running to check what we were eating. “Yay!” She yelled. “Spaghetti!”

    The kids cleaned their plates that night. So did Marc. I cleaned up the dishes and had a good laugh to myself as I washed and dried the pasta pot and sauce pan. What an easy, simple dinner to make – we could make it a weekly thing!

    I get it, Mom. Fifteen years too late, maybe, but I get it.

    Since that night, I’ve made spaghetti and tomato sauce at least once every two weeks, if not more. And when I do, I like to imagine my kids in the future, sitting down at the table and moaning “Spaghetti again? Mom, I hate spaghetti!” It’ll be the perfect full-circle ending to my spaghetti journey.

    Humble pie, it turns out, tastes a lot like pasta and tomato sauce.

  • Get up and go.

    Inevitably when someone is expecting their first child, they get a lot of advice from other parents. Much of it is useless – get your sleep now! You won’t sleep when the baby comes! – but if you’re lucky, some of it might carry you through some rough times.

    After four and half years of frankly harrowing parenthood, my advice is this: comparison is the thief of joy.

    When Bea was born, I bought myself a copy of What to Expect: The First Year. In no way do I mean to disparage this book; it was an excellent resource during those first few months when I worried about everything and anything. But it has a fundamental flaw: it’s organized according baby’s developmental milestones throughout their first year, with summaries of what baby should be doing by what week or month.

    I checked those summaries religiously in the first six months of Bea’s life. At first, everything seemed fine. Bea was a happy, healthy little baby girl, and there wasn’t much to concern myself with. But when physical developmental milestones came due, like holding up her head and rolling over, the anxiety took over.

    The designated week by which she should be able to hold her head up came and went, and Bea was still pancaked on her play mat. When she was finally able to lift her head and keep it up for any length of time, we were honing in on being able to roll over. That one, too, came and went without Bea being able to so much as roll to her side.

    I was a mess of anxiety. Were we doing enough tummy time? Was I holding her wrong to breastfeed or cuddle? Maybe I should have held her upright to soothe her – except doing that always made her angrier. Was it something I was doing wrong?

    In retrospect, it was none of those things. I know now that guidelines are just that – guidelines, based on aggregate data and not on individual children. No teacher looking at a fourth grade classroom can tell you which kids were early to walk and which were late.

    Bea, it turns out, was just a lazy kid. She has never met a developmental milestone she was inclined to meet. She rolled over late, sat up late, crawled late, walked late.

    When she was six month olds (and finally rolling over, thank goodness) I put my copy of What to Expect away. I’d spent so much of the first six months of Bea’s life stressing over what she should have been doing that I missed what she was doing.

    By the time Bea was two and George was born, I was much better as letting the milestones coming to us rather than trying to get us to them. George, too, was not an early developer, but this time, I was able to let go of my worry and enjoy watching him meet his challenges in his own time.

    By the time George was 17 months old, he had been “kneeing” it around the house for two months and tearing out all the knees in his pants. We’d encouraged him to get up and walk, but so far, he wasn’t interested. I shrugged it off and bought iron-on patches for his pants (if you really want to know, yes, a determined little boy can also tear out patches in his mended pants, too).

    That Easter, we took the kids over to my parents’ house for Easter dinner. All my siblings and their kids were there, including George’s cousin Henry, who was born just four days before George and who had been proudly walking for a few months already.

    George sat on the carpet in my parents’ living room for an hour or so, watching Henry walk by as he played. And then, without any fanfare (and surprisingly little effort), he got to his feet and walked off to follow him, and never looked back.

    Two years before, I’d have agonized comparing George’s progress to Henry’s. It would have worried me to death wondering why my son couldn’t do what his cousin could. But on that day, I’d already let go of my worry over when he would take his first steps. And in doing so, the joy of watching him proudly march across my parents’ living room was so much sweeter.

    So, if I could go back and give myself the advice I didn’t know I needed before Bea made us a family of three, it would be this: every kid does things at their own pace. Take it one day at a time, and enjoy where you’re at today, because tomorrow, it will change. And in the immortal words of Bluey: Just run your own race.

  • Letter to my husband #1

    It’s hard to believe that when the summer ends this year, it will be ten years since we first met.

    Ten years since I walked into a bowling alley expecting to have a fun night with a couple of my girlfriends, and left with the first impression of you on my heart.

    In some ways, it feels like forever. And then sometimes, I ask myself, how have we made so much in just ten years?

    Ten years, two graduate degrees. A car. An engagement, a wedding. A house, and then a baby. The car traded in for a van. A second child, and then a third. One house sold, another purchased. The city where I was born, left behind.

    And still, you keep leaving those impressions on my heart. Like the tracks left by wheels in a dirt road, I’m intimately familiar with the place you have made for yourself in my life, the space in my heart that holds you close.

    I remember the second time we saw each other. Eating take out on the back porch of my part-time retail job, because I was working a double shift and hadn’t brought anything to eat. It didn’t bother me, but it bothered you. So you brought me food – pasta, chicken Parmesan, soup – and sat with me while I ate it, even though it was October and cold.

    You didn’t ask for anything in return, and I loved you a little bit for that.

    Ten years later, and you still never ask for much.

    You have given, time and time again. Given your time, your energy, your love. In the daily shuffle of raising three tiny terrors, there often isn’t enough of anything left over at the end of the day for yourself, but you still get up every morning, ready to give it all again.

    I’ve watched you share your favourite snacks with Bea because you can’t resist her begging face. Read a sixth, seventh, eighth book with George because he always wants one more, and you just can’t say no to him. Cuddle Flo until your arms have gone to sleep, because you don’t want to put her down when she’s so comfortable on you.

    And I’ve seen how you give me your support, every day, without fail, for ten years. My good days are built on the foundation of the support you give me, and my bad days are salvaged by the love you never fail to show me. Ten years, and you have never stopped proving that I was right all along.

    My friends and I left the bowling alley the night we met talking about you. The one I suspect had invited you on purpose asked me I thought about you.

    “I don’t know,” I told her. “He seems like a good guy.”

    A good guy.

    A good husband. A good father. A good man.

    Happy Father’s Day, my love. You are all that and more.

  • The wild giraffes of southern Ontario.

    Southern Ontario is home to wild, free-roaming giraffes.

    You can be forgiven for not knowing. I didn’t know myself until a few weeks ago, and I’ve lived here all my life.

    It was the dandelions that tipped me off. The first day their yellow heads started coming up and looking for the sun, Bea was in love. She loves flowers of all kinds (fleurs as she calls them, because flowers are too fabulous for English), and I think she genuinely loves weeds the best.

    The way home from her bus stop in the afternoon has plenty of dandelions to pick from, and she loves picking them. At first, it was bouquets for me, which were promptly enthroned in an old baby bottle-turned-vase on the kitchen island. And then, one day, she got off the bus and told me we needed dandelions for a different reason.

    The giraffes.

    It should be noted that these are not ordinary giraffes. You’re probably thinking of the two-syllable giraffes, the kind you see in zoos and nature documentaries. Not these ones.

    These are giraffes.

    Okay, they look the same. But if you were to talk to Bea, you’d realize that her giraffes sound more like giraffez. It’s a three-syllable word, and it’s an important distinction, because these giraffes (three-syllables!) only live in southern Ontario.

    In fact, they might only live in our neighbourhood.

    This was what Bea told me on the way home as we gathered a sizeable bunch of dandelions. The giraffes live quite close by to our house, and it turns out, they are very hungry creatures. They told Bea they like to eat dandelions, so naturally, she thought she’d bring them some.

    At home, we put out our dandelions on the garden wall, laid out neatly like a salad. Bea explained that the giraffes are quite shy and probably wouldn’t come and have a snack if we stood there, so we decided it would be better to go in the house. Perhaps, to give the giraffes plenty of privacy, we could even put on an episode of Doc McStuffins and really not pay attention to the front yard.

    Twenty minutes later, Doc was busy fixing toys on the tv and I was busy making dinner in the kitchen. No one was looking out the front windows. We had dinner, the kids had baths, got tucked into bed, went to sleep for the night.

    The next morning, the dandelions were gone. Bea went out the door to go to her bus stop and the garden wall was empty, no trace of the dandelions left behind. Those giraffes sure were hungry. We decided we’d have to get some more dandelions for them on the way home again. And we did.

    The dandelions are fading now. Their yellow heads have gone puffy and white, and Bea is more interested in making wishes and blowing dandelion seeds than leaving snacks for the giraffes.

    But I haven’t forgotten. And I don’t think I’ll ever forget how wonderful it is to see through the eyes of a four-year-old, and to have my world filled not with weeds, but with fleurs and wild, three-syllable giraffes.

  • Bathroom buddies.

    More than a year into my potty training journey with my kids, I’ve arrived at two incontrovertible truths:

    • The phrase I have to use the bathroom is contagious among preschoolers; and,
    • There is nothing more interesting to the preschooler mind than underwear.

    My daughter Bea has been potty trained for about a year now. I can’t take credit for it; she saw her little friends at daycare using the potty and it was game over for diapers. She was thrilled to be a big girl using the toilet, and since overcoming her fear of automatic-flushing toilets, has made it her mission to use every public toilet she comes across. (Coming soon to a blog near you: my definitive ranking of public bathrooms in Southern Ontario.)

    This past Saturday, we took the kids to attend their cousin’s First Communion. Bea was thrilled because it was an opportunity to see her best-friend-and-cousin, Coco. They’re five months apart in age and adore each other, but my sister and her family live about an hour away by car, so the girls don’t get to see each other as often as we’d like. As soon as we arrived at church, Bea happily abandoned us and parked herself next to Coco in the pew.

    I didn’t pay much attention to the girls for the first half of Mass. My youngest, Flo, was determined to practice walking up and down the side aisle of the church and I was dutifully following her and preventing her from lighting the place on fire with prayer candles. But as I walked toward the back of the church for the 67th time in 30 minutes, I spotted Bea and Coco waving at me from the front entrance where they were waiting in line for the bathroom.

    It turns out Bea decided she needed to pee halfway through Mass and that her auntie was the only one who could take her to the bathroom. Hearing this, Coco decided she had to pee, too, so my sister got to lead the pee-schooler procession up the aisle to the bathroom at the back of the church.

    Inside the bathroom, the task at hand was completely forgotten in the excitement of examining each other’s underwear. There was oohing and aahing. There were audible exclamations of how amazing the other party’s underpants were. There was a comparison of belly buttons. There was even an attempt to strip naked to show off said underwear even better, although my sister put a stop to that before the party really got started. (In case you were wondering, that one was Bea. It’s always Bea.)

    After the girls finished their business (herded along by my sister, who was the only one in the room at all concerned with the line up outside the door), both girls informed me that they’d had a wonderful time using the bathroom together. In fact, Bea even mentioned it to me again that evening as I was tucking her into bed.

    The following day, after my sister had relayed all of this information to me while laughing hysterically, she sent me a text message.

    From Coco tonight: “My greatest adventure yesterday was going pee with Bea!”

    Forget play-dates. I’ll be reaching out to my sister soon to schedule more pee-dates.

  • Mother’s Day.


    Another year. Another Mother’s Day.

    I haven’t celebrated very many of them from this side. The first was five years ago, when my motherhood was confined to the little spark of a person growing inside me. The pregnancy tracking app on my phone told me she was the size of a lime, not yet big enough to show or to feel.

    That first Mother’s Day was more about the promise of what was to come. The arrival of a little person who would turn our marriage into a family. The baby who would teach me all the highs and lows of becoming a mother.

    The biggest lesson, I have always felt, was learning to look backwards as well as forwards.

    Prior to that first Mother’s Day five years ago, I had celebrated twenty-eight Sundays in May honouring my own mother. I loved Mother’s Day. I have always loved gift giving, and Mother’s Day was no exception. I enjoyed picking out a gift, wrapping it up, delivering it before Mass on Sunday morning, and most of all, loved the joy that would light up my mom’s face. Hand-picked dandelions from the front yard or a new spring outfit in her favourite colour, she loved them all, every year.

    Our relationship hasn’t always been the best. There were rough teenage years, even rougher twenty-something years. Although I have always, and will always, love my mom, I can admit now that some years were better than others. There was a lot of misunderstanding that went both ways, and sometimes, very little grace given.

    The arrival of my daughter changed that.

    I became a mother, and for the first time in my life, stood in my mother’s shoes. I endured the sleepless nights, the fussy days, the isolation and loneliness of becoming a mother during a global pandemic. I fought through days when it seemed like bedtime would never come and thought to myself, how did mom do this all day, every day, with four kids?

    At the same time, I had a front row seat to my mom’s relationship with my daughter. For the first year of her life, we visited my parent’s house every Monday and spent the day. I watched my daughter sleep in her grandma’s arms, watched my mom play with her as she learned to roll over, learned to sit up. Saw my mom walk her up and down the hallway in her house, rocking her when she had trouble sleeping. Listened to her read stories to her, from the same books she read to me as a child. And most importantly, witnessed the pure and unconditional love she gave her granddaughter, and that her granddaughter gave back to her.

    That love was transformational. It reminded me that despite the obstacles our relationship had encountered, I had once been that baby, that she had once walked me up and down the hall when I couldn’t sleep, sang me the same songs, and read me the same stories. That the love I saw her pour out every Monday to the best part of my life was the same love that underpinned everything she did for me.

    As my daughter has grown, and as she’s been joined by her younger brother and sister, I’ve learned a lot about what my mom must have gone through in those early days of my life. I still wonder how she managed with four kids, at home with us all day while my dad worked. I still don’t have an answer.

    But I do understand more of what she did, and what she gave, to be our mom. The sacrifices it took to care for us, and the frustrations and setbacks she must have endured. I’ve learned to look backwards, learned to understand what I see when I do.

    A few years ago, while browsing Mother’s Day cards for the kids to give grandma, I picked up one when the words on the front caught my eye. When you have kids, you’ll understand. Love, Mom. I opened the card, read the inside, and laughed out loud in the store.

    Loud and clear, mom. Loud and clear.

    Happy Mother’s Day.