It's Going to be a Long 40 Days and Nights...

This week saw the beginning of Lent...that time of year when some of us take a few moments to ponder what it is we will give up in the name of Jesus to somehow make ourselves a little holier. For some people, every Ash Wednesday brings the annual chocolate, coffee or wine break...for others it's choosing to spend 40 days trying to be more God-like through prayer or fasting.

And me? This year I decided to give up yelling at the kids for forty days and nights. I figured if Jesus could go without food and sleep in the desert for that long, I should be able to do something this simple, right?

I can hear you laughing, you know...

It's Awfully Quiet In Here...

Emma woke up around 2:45 am this morning and crawled into bed with us. Although she has been sleeping through the night since we switched her medication last week, for some reason she was awake for about two hours today.

She woke up with no problems and went off to school quite happily with her brothers and sister.

At some point this morning, that cheerful little girl left the building and was replaced by a frightful creature who prefers spitting and hitting to hugs and kisses. I realized that my daughter was exhausted and sent her off to bed for a wee nap (this after she tried to physically remove Jamie's head from his body because he was playing on Club Penguin and Emma wanted her turn...)...

And as I sit her typing, I realize that it is eerily quiet in this house...and that this peaceful moment is merely a foretaste of what every day will be like in a couple of years, when all four children are in school all day long...

I'm not really sure I'm going to like it...

My Kingdom for a Good Night's Sleep...

It's been a few days since my last post, and the only excuse I have is that my darling youngest daughter, Emma, has turned into a snarling, hitting, spitting baby jaguar...one that I am ready to return to the jungle...

Emma is not sleeping at night, due to the new medication she is on for ADHD. Please do not yell at me that I shouldn't have her on meds, or that they will cause brain cancer. They don't. And as someone who has ADHD, I can tell you that the difference between being on the drugs and not being on them is like the difference between dial-up and high-speed internet connections.

Emma's twin brother, Jamie, is also on ADHD meds, and the difference between Jamie before and Jamie after is like night and day...he is not drugged out of his mind, but he can now sit at the dinner table and have a conversation with the rest of us, without having to be told over and over (usually at increasing decibels) to sit down. Jamie, however, is not having any problems whatsoever sleeping. In fact, he seems to be sleeping better than usual.

Emma, on the other hand, appears to have taken after her older brother, Ian, who, when he first started taking meds, was awake for three to four hours every. single. night. for six months. Once he was finally able to swallow a pill whole, Ian switched over to a different medication, and started sleeping through the night again. Emma now seems to be following the same pattern.

The difference this time is that I am not prepared to spend six months not sleeping. When she first started taking the meds two weeks ago, she had no problem on the lesser dosage. Her problems started when we increased the dose after the first week (as prescribed by her doctor)...and so today we are trying her on her original dosage to see if that somehow helps her get through the night...which would mean that we would get more than three and a half hours of sleep too.

I'm really hoping that it is the meds that are causing the problem, and that her lack of sleep is the reason why she keeps sticking her tongue out at me...why she keeps trying to punch me...why she has been completely obstinate when I tell her to do anything...

Then again, maybe her behavior is simply her being four and a half years old and trying to assert her independence.

Please let it be the meds, because if this is an indication of her true personality, puberty ain't gonna be pretty...

It's Family Day....

...and my prayer is this:

"Lord, please save me from p.d. days..."

Some Days You Just Won't Win...

Yesterday my kids were "meeting" each other on Club Penguin. For those of you that don't know, Club Penguin is an online kids community created by a group of parents in British Columbia who wanted to make sure their kids had a safe, online venue.

The kids each get their own penguin, and roam around the "town", meeting each other or playing various games to win coins, which they then use to either buy things for their penguins or their puffles. Puffles are pets to the penguins, and you have to feed them every day, or they will run away, and then you have to play more games to get more coins to get another puffle to feed it and keep it happy and so on and so on...

One of the places the penguins can meet is the dojo. (Yep, apparently there are ninja penguins in the Antarctic...don't see that on the Discovery channel, now do you?) My kids, using my laptop, my husband's laptop and their computer, like to go to the dojo together, where they try to advance from one belt level to the next.

However, Brian and I have to keep telling them how to pronounce the word, "dojo". They keep calling it a "doo-jo". We tell them again and again that the proper pronounciation is "doe-jo". They do not believe us. This is a conversation between me and Jamie from yesterday morning...

Jamie: "Ian! (Jamie also pronounces Ian's name as 'Eon', another habit we're trying to break) Meet me at the doojo!"
Me: "Jamie, it's called a 'doe-joe'."
Jamie: "No, it's not, it's called a doo-jo!"
Me: "No, Jamie, it's called a doe-jo..."
Jamie: "No, it's not, Mama! It's a doo-jo!"
Me: "Doe-jo!"
Jamie: "Doo-jo!"
Me: "Jamie, will you please just accept that I am your mother and I know a few things that you don't? It's a doe-joe."
Jamie: "Mama, it hasn't been called that for centuries!"

I couldn't say anything else.

Transformers...more than meets the eye...

My boys, getting ready for Sunday night...

And yes, that's Avery screaming in the background that they are about to miss the start of their show...

I'm a what now?

For almost nine years, I have been a stay-home mother. This has caused some consternation among some people I know who think that I am wasting my time and talents or that I should be out in the workforce contributing to society and to our family income. (My husband will argue that I am helping out financially, since we don't have to pay for daycare and the government sends us a little cash every month just for having procreated)...

Many times I have felt that I am invisible to others-especially on those occasions when someone I've only just met (usually through Brian's fairly high profile job-he's a reporter on Parliament Hill) asks me what I do for a living. The anticipation in their faces quickly dims when I reply, "I stay home and look after our four children." It's as though I suddenly start fading from sight right before their eyes. I even had one guy turn his back on me (really!) after finding out that I don't go out of the house to work.

Most days I don't regret my decision to stay home with the kids, but I will admit that there are times when I feel as though I am Brian's shadow. It happens when I hear about the accomplishments of people I know, sometimes of people I've never even met; it happens when I've spent the day doing load after load of laundry or have been constantly picking up after the kids (and sometimes Brian); it happens when I've got pms and I don't like what I see in the mirror.

I started this blog because for as long as I can remember, I've had the urge to write. I've written little stories for the kids; I've started screenplays; I've written poetry (most of it embarrassingly bad)...my grandmother told me when I was 10 years old that I should be a writer-this after reading the start of a story I did about a soldier in the trenches during World War I...my sisters have encouraged me to write, so has my husband. I even had a drama teacher tell me during my university days that I should consider writing as a profession.

I ignored all of them.

Now, at the age of 40, I'm a published author. Granted, it's only been four articles, but nonetheless, they have been published. That those four little pieces have been accepted by someone who isn't related to me (and therefore has to be nice to me), means that maybe, just maybe, I need to rethink the labels I've created for myself...I am a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend...

And now, I am a writer.

A Big Thank You...

...to Deborah Gyapong and Brigitte Pellerin...who both not only read the piece I wrote for Mercatornet, but very kindly posted links to both the article and this blog and said some very nice things about my writing...

Brigitte didn't agree with me (well, not all points anyway), so check out her blog, not just to see her rebuttal of my article, but to read more of this engaging, intelligent and (I think) brilliant writer.

You can see one of Deborah's blogs here... check it out and see the lovely compliments she paid to me...and to read more of her ongoing and courageous struggle to fight for free speech in Canada.

(PS...Deborah's pdb too...and for those that don't know Scottish vernacular, that means "pure dead brilliant" - don't forget to use a Scottish accent when you say it...)

And the winner is...

An update to the battle between Emma and I over whether she would eat her dinner...

I won.

Without having to bribe, force feed her or tie her to a chair.

Although I may have scared the other three a wee bit when I told Emma that if she kept refusing to eat, eventually she would end up in the hospital with a feeding tube down her throat and an iv in her arm...

Emma didn't seem to care.

Ian, Avery and Jamie, however, may have developed a sudden, although not irrational, fear of hospitals and may need therapy a few years from now...

In This Corner...

In a battle of wills betwen an adult and a four year old, who will emerge victorious?

At this point, if you're guessing the four year old, I'm thinking you might be right.

Emma refused to eat her dinner last night. Absolutely refused to open her mouth. Since I don't believe in forcefully shoving food down her throat (and just how would one do that anyway? I mean, you could get it into her mouth, I suppose, but how could you make her swallow?), that meant no dinner. (And no, I did not offer her anything other than what was on the table; I am not setting that as a precedent)

This morning she had a bowl of cereal for breakfast. She had a pumpkin muffin a bit later, and has eaten nothing since.

Did I mention that it is now close to dinner?

I did offer her the plate from last night (reheated, of course) while her brothers and sister enjoyed their lunch.

Again she refused.

At snack time, she attempted to block me from giving the others their food (she was unsucessful), and told me (several times over) that she wanted a "snack food that is not the food from last night".

I informed her that if she wanted something to eat, she was more than welcome to finish her dinner from last night.

You can guess how that idea went over.

So here we are, nearly twenty four hours later, and my youngest daughter has barely eaten. I'm sure she won't starve, but I am not looking forward to dinner tonight. Emma's dinner will once again be her "disgusting" (this adjective for food she hadn't even tasted) dinner from last night. This ain't gonna be pretty folks...

The question is this: just how many times can a plate of food be reheated before it turns into a science experiment?

I guess we'll find out tonight...

Welcome Mercatornet readers!

If you've read my latest at Mercatornet and found your way here, welcome.

If you haven't read it, click on the link above, next to the picture of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt to read about Hollywood's Red Carpet Morality.


This blog is still fairly new and deals mostly with family and culture. Poke around a little and please don’t forget to come back.

Some of my writing that you may want to check-out

From the Blog

The Reason For The Name
Four Year Old Logic...
A Brief List That Explains Why No One Understands My Children...
Introducing Emma...

Some of my past writing over at Mercatornet

Not your father’s Levi’s
Coddling kindergartners

So It's Not Just Me...

I was reading Dawn Meehan's blog Because I Said So, and I can completely relate...because as I sit here, I have four children coming at me with four different requests...

Emma wants me to warm her feet up. She refuses to put socks on (the easiest way to warm her tootsies). Oh, no. She wants to sit with her feet under my legs, humming a rather strange little tune in her own language.

Avery insists on doing her homework, despite the fact that it's not due until Friday, the little keener. But this means that she must constantly ask me how to spell things, since she won't wait until after dinner to start her work. And yelling at her younger brother and sister because she needs quiet.

Ian, who has been home sick from school, wants to know if he should play on the computer. If he should, not if he can...

And Jamie wants to finish the letter to Santa that he started last night. Note that today is February 3.

Emma says she thinks she's going to throw up tonight.

No one wants to leave the laptap alone so that I can type.

"Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday..." sings Emma.

"How do you spell late, Mummy?" asks Avery.

"Turn the tv off!" that would be me, yelling at them.

And this is a calm five minutes around here...

A PostScript...I have been trying (unsuccessfully, I might add and am ready to throw this piece of trash laptop through a window) to add a link to Dawn's website at the start of this post...you know, where I mentioned her blog...I thought it would be appropriate there...anyway, it's not working, so here is the link...this had better work....grrr...

Ok, for some reason, unknown to me in all my non-techno abilities, this link is not working...so you can just click on it in the right hand column of my blog...

Am I The Only One Who Actually Looks At The Calendar?

So yesterday was Groundhog Day, and on radio stations across the continent, in newspapers and television newscasts, everyone seemed absolutely shocked that whichever groundhog was doing the forecasting, they all said the same thing...six more weeks of winter.

Which led me to yell, "Of course it's six more weeks of winter you morons! It's always six more weeks of winter! Spring doesn't come until March 20!"

Sometimes I think I'm the only one with any common sense.