Gone To The Park!

It has been getting warmer everyday around here, so Kieran and I have been spending the better part of our days at the park. That means that means that, when we come home, not only am I sunburned (because, while I am careful that Kieran is appropriately protected from sun, I forget that even bench knitters like myself can get burnt in a couple of hours with no hat and no sunscreen) but I am completely knackered!

So, as my son tells me to "wait a freaking minute" (see, he's learning my swear substitutes, too), and before I run off to the park again, I will give you this picture of Kieran in one of his favourite park rides: the Chief Inspector's Car!

Welcome to spring!

The Whole Truth

Little kids don't lie. Except when you ask them if they just pooped themselves, then they lie up a storm.

But, in the normal course of conversation, kids just don't understand that some things are better left unsaid.

Take for instance, every single time I climb into the shower, past Kieran who is standing on his shower stool (because we don't have a bathtub, he gets to shower with us). Without fail, as I climb into the shower stall and shimmy around Kieran and his stool in that tight space, Kieran says the following:

"Mummy, you have a big bum!"

Yes, sweetie, my does indeed have a big bum.

Oh F@#k!

I am an inveterate swearer.

I have had a foul mouth for as long as I know. I embraced swearing, as a young woman, as something that was subversive; to me, swearing was as unladylike as language got and whatever was unladylike was both punk and feminist.

That it made my parents mad was deinitely part of the appeal.

But, as a mother, I can no longer be a swearer.

I mean, it sure is funny to hear your son say, "fuck" one day. But, only once.

Recently, we were sitting, as a family, in the livingroom preparing to watch Charlie and The Chocolate Factory (weird and surreal, btw, not sure if I liked it). We use our PS2 as a DVD player and the cheap remote control we used was nearing the end of it's usefulness.

Over and over I stabbed at the buttons, trying to make them choose this option or that, move up and sideways and down. I pressed on them so hard that I got video game fingers (you know, where you play video games for so long and with such ferocity that your finger and thumb tips start to hurt from pressing on the controller).

Eventually, I reached out to Sean, in a huff, and said, "here! You do it. 'Cause if I keep doing this I'll lose my fucking mind!"

Sean took the remote from me for his own turn with the useless piece of plastic as Kieran said, "Daddy, I lose my fucking mind, too!"

Sean looked at me with accusing eyes. He's been trying to get me to curb the swearing for a while now. I hid behind a knitting pattern, gawped and tried not to laugh.

We didn't say anything to Kieran. We had agreed that the best way to deal with swearing was to not bring too much attention to it and therefore not create a game for Kieran: how to make Mummy and Daddy freak out!

Everything was going along OK for another couple of months. I hadn't really changed my ways, but Kieran wasn't swearing. Oh, I was in such denial!

Then, the other day, I walked into the living room while Kieran was playing with some cars and trucks and heard him chattering away, "Now, you get in the tow truck. Ok!" "No, I no want to!" "Oh, goddammit!"

If I had a personal sound editor, he would have spliced in the sound of shreiking tires, I stopped so fast. 'Goddammit?' Did I even say that? Did I say it often?

Finally I knew it: I had a problem and I had better do something fast! It's time for some new, gentler, toddler friendly swear words.

It's hard changing the way you speak. I swear instinctively. I must mutter the phrase, "fuckety fuck-fuck" under my breath a half dozen times a day!

Now I experiment with words like shaggit and frick.

My grandmother's endearing use of the Irish "feck" will just not cut it.

Hilary Lang, over at Wee Wonderfuls, has started using "Holy Hotdogs!"

What toddler friendly cusses do you use?

Some Fun Things To Do With Paper and Cardboard

For some reason, I'm having troubling sitting and focusing long enough to write a post for you. I apologise. You come here to read entertaining and sometimes provocative things about being a woman and a mother and I'm giving you nothing.

I won't make a big habit of apologies. And, starting next week, I'll be returning to my daily writing schedule.

In honour of the weekend, I will give you some cool links I've been collecting with regards to papercrafts.

This isn't about scrapbooking, it's about making cool toys with paper. So, enjoy. I hope you are inspired to make something with your little ones or for yourself. And, if you do, please leave a comment with a link to a photo. I think everyone would love to see what people are making.

• Cardboard building plans from Mr. McGroovy's. Building plans for a castle, a pirate ship and a fire engine, all made out of boxes!
• Paper Sushi! Make paper models of sushi with these cool instructions.
• Make a launchable paper Rocket Ship!
• Vintage Jumping Jack toys: paper people with movable limbs.
• Papercraft motorcycles!
• Rare animals of the world papercraft model series.
• Amazing, whimsical blog of papercrafts: Paper Forest.
• Paper crustaceans and fish, in Japanese!
• Paper bugs, too!

So, if you're bored, get out some paper and make something!

Aqua Kitchen

Inspired by this post by Knitting Iris, I have some lovely aqua photos to share.

I don't know when, but I fell in love with old aqua kitchen gear. Very slowly, I have been building a collection of aqua coloured mid-20th Century stuff that just makes me tingle with delight.


I love these stacking tins, the aqua ones in particular. These were made in Canada by a company called A.R. Lite. The are called The Queen Line.


Beside the tins is this clock radio, once owned by Sean's parents. They wanted a more accurate alarm, which either we or Sean's sister bought for them. After setting it up, I begged to take this home with us. I love the chrome and blue on the facing. Sean has a thing for old audio equipment. This little workhorse joined us in the kitchen and we use it to listen to Hamilton Bulldogs road games.



My tea cupboard holds all of my tea things (old kettles which I don't use, a dozen types of tea, even though I only drink English Breakfast, loose tea, tea gadgets, old loose tea tins...) but it also holds the chocolate sauce for milk, hot chocolate powder and instant coffee for guests. My oldest kitchen accessory can be seen here. It is a Dutch tea canister that once belonged to my mum. I believe it came from my Granny, before that. We'd had it in our home since I could remember and my mum gave it to me when I moved out at 18. I use it every day of my life.

Beside it, above the hot chocolate powder, it a little aqua sugar bowl. It, unfortunately, doesn't have a divot in the lid for the spoon, so I'm ever afraid the lid, which is off-white stonewear, will clatter out of the cupboard and die a horrible death shattered on the ceramic floor. I could totally avoid this by keep the spoon out of the bowl, but then I wouldn't have anywhere to keep the tiny spoon that commemorates my dad's (and his lovely wife's) trip to Switzerland. The spoon is from Lucerne, home of Rolex. My dad is a fancy watch geek!

Being that they are both Scandanavian, the tea tin and the sugar spoon keep each other company.


I found this jug (jug? bowl?) a few years ago. I was finally able to get rid of the old mayo jars I used previously. I suspect that this piece of turquoise stonewear was a wine cooler or an ice bucket. It has an odd shape for a bowl, very upright. Then again, perhaps this kilned piece of kitchen ware is serving its intended purpose.

To the left of the jug is my water kettle, which gets multiple daily use. I would be lost without it. On the right, is the tiny little coffee maker we bought for when Sean's dad visits. Neither Sean nor I drink coffee and we don't do much entertaining, so we'd never had a coffee maker before. Sean's dad, who stays with us ever couple of months for a day or two, eventually brought over a bodum to make his coffee. Unfortunately, I knocked the damned thing flying one day and it smashed. So, I bought the little electric contraption, which is just large enough to make about a half teacup of coffee - actually, it's six cups, it's like the tardis: it has more internal capacity than it appears to have from the outside.


This bowl is perhaps my favourite piece in the entire kitchen. It used to be a pair (originally it would have been a set of three) of mixing bowls, but the smaller of the two met its demise at the hands of a curious toddler. I think I actually cried when Kieran smashed that bowl. So, this beauty lives inside a cupboard, protected from little hands.

Here it is in action, waiting to be the recepticle for a yummy seafood and pasta salad. It's a great mixing bowl. The high sides and small base make it ideal for using the electric hand mixer to make cakes and puddings and icing and muffins and whipped cream and other delicious things that start out gooey and require much speedy mixing.

I have a pair of broken aqua salt and pepper shakers in the cupboard which used to be in regular use, but one was smashed and the other has so much crazing on the top that the glaze is starting to chip off.

I have one china cup with an aqua blue exterior glaze. It's part of a thrifted bunch of beauties I'll pull out and photograph for you one day.

I've just bought a quilted vinyl tablecloth for our old chrome edged table. It gives a wonderful spark of colour to the room while being very toddler/craft friendly.

I received a beautiful set of aqua dishes for my wedding last year (from my sister-in-law Julie) that I'm afraid to take out of the box for fear of chipping. I need to splurge and get a second set of them as insurance against dinnerware catastrophe and a full eight place settings for those rare occaisions when we food more mouths than our own.

And, finally, I have a double set of christmas dishes in aqua that I saw on sale days before christmas when I was pregnant with Kieran. They have a dotted line drawings on them of retro themed christmas images: gingerbread men and women, tree shaped cookies, stars and bells. They're really beautiful. When I first saw them, my heart almost stopped. I wasn't the kind of person who had themed cups and plates for the holidays but I knew if I didn't buy those dishes right that very second, I'd never ever get an opportunity to have them. They were the sort of thing that, had I passed them up, I'd have thought about them every christmas for the rest of my life. They were on sale for $30, I think, and there were only two boxes left. I bought them immediately and had them sit in the loading area until we were finished with the rest of our shopping. I've never regretted buying them.

The Kind Of Man I Would Respect

It's no secret I have opinions. And those opinions are formed by my beliefs which rise out of a solid foundation of feminism. My particular foundational feminism holds that women are indeed different than men: we are physically built differently and our chemical makeup is different which causes us to think differently.

But, I am also a humanist. I believe that each individual has the same potential as the next. If every other factor is the same, men and woman can each grow to become great at anything they desire to be great at. I believe the social differences between men and women are largely taught: teach a woman to be a nurturer and she will grow to believe it is her fundamental duty in life to care for and enrich the lives of others; teach a man to be to be nurturer and he will grow to nurture and help those around him.

So, it's these beliefs that inform how I raise my son. And I want to raise the kind of man I would admire, that I would love, that I would desire, if I weren't his mum.

As a first step on the route to raising this man, I want to teach my son that the things that some people think are dirty or taboo are really just a normal part of life. So, as a mom, I'm very open with Kieran. I call a penis a penis and a vagina is a vagina (and yes, I'm fully aware that the entirety of a female's genitals is not called a vagina, but at three Kieran needs only one term to describe the pink bits - when he's 18 he'll know all the names of all the lovely little folds and bumps and some girl will be very, very lucky indeed).

It makes some people uncomfortable to hear me or Kieran say that, but I couldn't care less. Hearing Kieran say things that make other people uncomfortable usually makes me quite happy. Like when Kieran, totally out of the blue, says, "I hab a penis and you have a bagina, Mummy!"

I give Kieran a big, happy, proud grin and tell him, "Yes, Kieran! That's right! I have a vagina because I'm a girl and boys have a penis and you're a boy so you have a penis."

But, these are things I deliberately and clearly teach Kieran. What really makes me proud as a mom is when he says things that I haven't deliberately taught him or things that I didn't think were clear and understandable to him and he says them in a way that proves he has a positive understanding of them.

Take, for example, yesterday. I was in my room, folding clothes on my bed and Kieran was standing at the footboard, driving trucks and trains along it. He mostly muttered to himself and talked to his machines while I folded clothes quietly. It was a companionable moment - a moment when the whole of life seems to be happiness and peace and happily fullfilled destiny.

Kieran looked up at me and asked, in a tender and concerned way, "Mummy? It you bleeding time?"

I was a little surprised and not sure I'd heard him right. "What's that, honey?"

"It you bleeding time, Mummy?" he asked again, with that same tilted head and delicate smile and curious concern, as if he were asking if a wound still hurt or a sadness still made me feel sad.

He was asking about my period.

See, in our home, there is no such thing as privacy, especially where bathroom matters are concerned. Sean rarely closes the bathroom door, and even though I might close it on myself, Kieran is usually asking to join me. Sometimes I feel like being alone, but more often than not, I let him in. I certainly don't mind.

Every month, of course, there are those three or four or five days of bleeding.

When Kieran first started asking what my tampons and pads were, I figured that technical terms would be beyond his understanding, so I couched my discussion in terms he could understand. "Sometimes Mummy's need special diapers."

Inevitably he'd see a liner on the bed with the clothes I intended to put on after my shower. "That you diaper, Mummy?" he'd ask.

"Yes, sweety. That's my special diaper."

Eventually, it wasn't just the liners and tampons and pads he saw, but he saw what went on them, too. Curious little boys turn and look at what you are doing when you least expect them to and with that, the questions start.

"What dat! You bleeding, Mummy? You OK, Mummy? You not sick?" Always asked with tender concern, Kieran is looking for assurance that the blood he sometimes saw on me didn't mean danger and pain like it did for him.

That's when I started explaining what a period was. "Mummies bleed, every month. When a mummy bleeds, it means there is no baby in her belly. If no blood comes out of Mummy every month, it means there is a baby growing in her belly."

With those big, curious eyes, Kieran listened to my explanation. I only explained that once or twice. I don't get a lot of opportunity to explain it because a whole month goes by before Kieran gets any kind of chance to see the blood again and prompt my simplified explanation.

I don't know what prompted him to ask about it this time. I wasn't dressing, I wasn't menstruating, I wasn't in the bathroom. None of the usual prompts were around.

Something in his tone was so touching, though. And that phrase: Bleeding Time. I liked it. It sounded right. And more, he'd created it. The phrase was his construction to fit a meaning he understood.

And, yet more than that, he wasn't afraid of it. Concerned perhaps, but not afraid. The blood didn't scare him. It wasn't dirty or icky or girl-stuff or any of the other shades of wrongness most men are brought up believing about menstruation and menstrual blood. It was merely this thing that happened to mummies from time to time. A bleeding time.

I felt so proud of him. This almost three year old boy had done something I'd have been proud of an adult man for doing: he treated this pivotal component of my womanness as just a normal thing. He'd been politely solicitous about it and my welfare. He'd given it a name: a nice and respectful name.

It was one of those crystalline moments when all my attempts to be a good, thoughtful, progressive and feminist mother came together in a moment of sparkling clairty.

I'm going to change the world. I'm going to raise my son to be the kind of man I would respect.

If You Have Sons...

Flea, at One Good Thing, has written a letter to her sons, for reading when they become teenagers.

If you have sons or young brothers or nephews or godsons, please read this. Then, print it off and give it to your boys.

I can't begin to express how powerfully moved I am by this piece of writing.

Kieran Rawks!

When Kieran celebrated his first birthday, his godfather Paul gave him a little electric guitar.

Paul is more than most godfathers. Since we're atheists, instead of charging Paul with seeing over Kieran's religious upbringing, we asked Paul to be a mentor to Kieran throughout his life. We asked him to become the man Kieran would go to if he couldn't come to us; to be a special and loving uncle to Kieran.

Paul is a musician (and more than that, a school teacher who has taught the love of music and sound to small children) and in one of his first acts of godfatherly love, he gave Kieran a guitar. At the time, Kieran was too small to play with it.

The package said "for children 3 and over", and Kieran was only just a year old! So, the guitar, along with some other special toys to be saved for later, went into storage.

On Sunday, Sean and I began an epic cleaning and decluttering of our home. We live on the first floor of a beautiful old home in the core of a fairly large city. It's a little on the small side some days, but it would be the lap of luxury if you were living in London!

One of the problems with the apartment -- and all flats have something wrong with them -- is that there is only one closet in the entire place. There is a wardrobe in the back bedroom (Kieran's room now) but there is only one real closet and it's in the hall.

Like all hall closets, it was filled with unused coats, spare shoes and so much assorted junk, it was hazardous to remove anything lest you upset the delicate balance and create an avalanche of once-perched hockey skates, packing materials, bike helmets, comic books, irons, etc., etc.

And, our room! No closet for the adults, so you can imagine that not long after we converted one of the livingrooms into a bedroom that it quickly became overrun with clothes and linens.

Then, last week, Sean and I were simultaneously struck by inspiration: clean out the hall closet and convert it into our closet, putting the unused coats into the warddrobe in Kieran's room. Kieran didn't use that warddrobe, so it would be perfect to store stuff that we rarely needed to access.

On Sunday, we hauled everthing out of both closets and set about sorting into piles: keep, toss, Value Village, sisters, eBay. The Value Village pile turned into five garbage bags full of old clothes (adult only, Kieran's old clothes have yet to be dealt with), as well as an ancient power pc, an old tin christmas tree base, a bunch of foam tiger claws from the local CFL team and a wire LP rack that we've never found the appropriate use for.

One bin that was opened contained a number of toys that we'd nearly forgotten about. They were things for Kieran when he reached the appropriate age. Things like collectible sports figures, action figures from old Japanese cartoons and a toy electric guitar.

Well, there was one thing Kieran had finally reached the appropriate age for: the guitar! After we'd popped in some batteries, he wore that thing around all afternoon until finally, Sean and my minds started developing nasty tumours from the noise!

You decide for yourself, would you enjoy this played endlessly for hours at screaming volume?



Thank you, Paul, for the wonderful gift. If nothing else, you've captured Kieran's imagination and given him joy. Now, if only I could get my ear to stop bleeding.

The Fall

*inspired by Mama C-Ta's recent, terrifying experience of having her son fall off the bed.

I cannot tell you how many times Kieran has rolled, swan dived or been dumped out of our bed . I have blocked it from my memory in an attempt to deny any of it ever happened!

We had a bedrail. We coslept. (We still do half the time, but I got rid of the siderail after awhile and stuck Kieran in the middle of the bed.) *I've* fallen out of the bed and bent the shit of of that bedrail!

A couple of memorable times:
- Kieran was around 6 mo and going through a monster fussy stage. It was a time where both he and I would cry all night, Sean would sit up with Kieran and then go to work in the morning on 11 and 1/2 minutes sleep.

Anyway, one night during the screamfest, around 2am, I thought "let's strap that kid into the sling and walk around with a tit in his mouth - that'll put him to sleep."

So, while Kieran screamed, I got the sling on and adjusted it and then attempted to slip Kieran down into the sling. We were facing my husband's dresser. Kieran chose just that moment when I was just getting his feet into the sling, when I wasn't holding him tightly, to arch his back and dive backwards into the corner of the dresser.

I was traumatized.

- When Kieran was only around 3 mo and just getting squirmy, he managed to squirm and roll himself right off of my queen-sized bed (where he'd hitherto been sleeping peacefully in the very centre or with a couple of pillows loosely placed around him as bumpers). I heard the thud and was across the apartment so fast physicists have had to come up with a new measure of smallness to describe the amount of time it took.

This was the first incident of falling and I was terrified. I thought I might pass out or throw up or both.

Kieran threw up. And continued to scream for a while. And then he threw up again.

I called Sean's mother (thank goodness she was still with us while Kieran was so little and I was so freaked out by being a new mom) who was a nurse. She advised me to look at Kieran's eyes. She said that if all else looked fine (nothing seemed broken or dislocated) I should look for a difference in pupil size to determine concussion. If the pupils were the same size and reacted the same way to light, Kieran was just bruised and scared and would be fine.

He was fine. In fact, within a few minutes of the puking and screaming, he fell asleep exhausted by effort of all that freaking out.

-Last year, before our wedding (and so before Sean and I bought a proper bed frame), Kieran was sleeping between Sean and I. Somehow, in the middle of the night he'd gotten turned around and on top of the covers. He must've dreamt he'd done a lot of running, because in the predawn, he'd managed to get him self so close to the foot of the bed that he did a backflip off the end of it.

I wonder if I was awake at all. Maybe I was in that lucid state of dreaming just before waking, because I seem to remember the event happening but being powerless to prevent it. In the second between the thud of Kieran's hard little head hitting the hardwood and the piercing scream of absolute confusion, pain and fear that came out of him next, Sean literally jumped out of bed into standing postion and said, "what happened!". I definitely saw that happen and it still amazes me to today: Super Daddy to the rescue!

We've never taken Kieran to an emergency room. We've felt confident that paying close attention to his demeanor and his physiology have given us the clues to his wellness (or lack thereof). It's scary, though, we you realise that you can't be there, keeping your baby safe, every microsecond of every day and that sometimes they get hurt.

The Ice Sparkles In The Sun

Inspired by Knitting Iris, Kieran and I made some beautiful ice wreaths to hang in the front window.


Kieran loved dumping (and boy, do I mean dumping!) glitter and sparkly things into the pans of water. He was so worked up at that I had to pull out glue and paper so that he could continue with his glittery crafts.


I've been getting more crafty with Kieran lately. He really likes to make things. It seems obvious, doesn't it? For a long time I resisted doing crafty stuff with him for fear of endlessly cleaning up crayon from the fridge and floor (true story) and glitter from the grout.

I've gotten over it, though.

The other day, after purchasing a new Thomas DVD (which I think we've watched 1437 times in the last week), Kieran ran around with the brochure and declared all of the things he wanted.

"Me want engine!" "Me need tunnel!" "Me want Emily!" "Me need Toby!" "Me want Diesel 10!" "ME NEEEEEEEEED DAT!"

You can imagine that it was getting the old frayed nerves a little. So, hoping to give him something a little more constructive to do with his many wants and I needs, I pulled out some crat supplies and we made a birthday wish list of all the lovely things in the brochure.


Kieran had lots of fun pasting all the little train things onto the page he decorated with crayons and pencils. It now sits on the fridge as a constant reminder of all the things Kieran absolutely must have for his birthday. I suppose I should start purchasing now. (imagine that was said with sarcasm)
While we certainly aren't the sort of people to spoil our child with store bought toys, it is very obvious that Kieran loves his engines.