I think I can officially say that my child is not a good sleeper.


She used to be. At first. We were delighted and not a tad secretly smug when we had a new baby and still got plenty of sleep. Co-sleeping and on-demand breastfeeding made us feel like we'd cracked the code to avoiding the cliched zombie-like visage of new parenthood.

That said, we always knew deep down that somewhere, somehow, the other shoe would drop. We just always figured that it would be the next kid that would slap us in our calm, rested faces with long nights of screaming wakefulness. But no, this one is a changeling it seems. Or rather, more accurately, it's that she hasn't changed. She still sleeps like a newborn.

She still wakes up at least 2-3 times a night. Every night. And insists on nursing back to sleep each and every time she wakes. She'll be two (yes, years) next week.

And woe is the mother that lacks the patience to lie still being a human soother for 30-45-60 minutes waiting for her child to re-embrace slumber. A loving father, a creaking floor board, a poorly-stifled cough, a move away too quickly. These will be greeted with much rage, sobbing, yelling and, worst of all, enhanced wakefulness.

I always mocked people who so arbitrarily pinpoint the time when your child is capable of "asking for it" as when breastfeeding becomes unnecessary or even inappropriate. I bet they'd be really scandalized to hear about how my kid now shouts for "boob!!!!" in her sleep. Like a somnambulant dissatisfied restaurant customer yelling at a tardy waiter.

I want to slap people who blather on stupidly about cherishing the moments when children are little. I want to fast-forward to her surly teen years where she spends an entire day cocooned behind a closed door. I would gladly trade the constant demand for maternal attention of toddlers for the thinly-veiled parental loathing of adolescents.

In fact, as I lie awake (multiple times) each night, I console myself by looking forward to savouring the future times I'll have to forcibly decant an unconscious pubescent from her warm comfy bed into the cold unwelcoming winter air to face another cruelly-early day of high school.

Well that and being a grandparent, of course. Payback is going to be so sweet.

Today, I love the internet.

Laws of Parenting (with crappy pictures).

via Cup of Jo

Cookie Monster Meets Tom Waits.

I cannot stop watching this. This is easily the best thing I have ever or will ever post.


Though, this is pretty funny too:

"And no wife in the world will ever let you spring for a cheap car seat. What’s that? You want the $30 Target generic car seat? NOT FOR MY BABY. No, no. We’re gonna get the Britax Marathon Series 7 with diamond-encrusted sippy cup holder and Kevlar belt. IT CAN WITHSTAND FORCES OF UP TO 12 G’S. Fucking $300 down the toilet, right then and there. And if you lack the foresight to space out your fuck trophies enough? You’re buying two, bitch. Or three.

That’s just the expense part. That’s not even the shittiest part of the whole deal. The worst part is installation. When we had our first kid, we had a car that was a 1997. It didn’t come equipped with the now mandatory child car seat latches in all new cars. So you had to install the car seat base by threading the seat belt through the base (horrible), then jumping on top of the base and pushing down on it like a suitcase with a dead body inside. Only the seat belt ALWAYS kept giving you slack, unlike all the other times the seat belt decides to ruin your day by fucking locking in when you don’t want it to. And you have to do all this in the back of your car when it’s 99 degrees out and your body is DYING." ~ This Week in F--K You: Child Car Seats

(both via Daddy Types)

"Gay men, like anyone, are well aware that we ought to use condoms. Just as the more than five million smokers in this country realize that the benefits of nicotine are limited to momentary gratification. Just as the more than two million Canadian diabetics know that chocolate cake is a transitory pleasure with real consequences. We, none of us, live rational lives. We rely on concerted efforts by health agencies to counter the haplessness of our lived experience. And this is doubly so when it comes to HIV; having never known a world without the virus makes it hard to even notice the thing. How long, really, can a small segment of the population be suspended in catastrophe?" ~ Michael Harris, "Life After Death"


Articles like this are why I asked for a subscription to The Walrus for my birthday this year (thanks Mom!).

"What I say in this column is that monogamy is like vegetarianism. All the evidence points to the fact that we've evolved as omnivores, but that doesn't mean that living as an omnivore in today's world is inherently superior than choosing to be a vegetarian. Being a vegetarian can make perfect sense, it can be ethical, healthy and smart -- but it's not going to come naturally, right? Just because you've decided to become vegetarian doesn't make you an herbivore. You're an omnivore who's chosen to live as a vegetarian, but bacon is still gonna smell good and you shouldn't feel guilty about that. I think it's offensive when social institutions like religions and governments and even some scientists say, "Hey, this should come naturally to you. This is human nature. If you get hungry when you smell bacon, there's something wrong with you."" ~ Christopher Ryan (interview)

Using bacon to discuss human sexuality = awesome.

"Wapner immediately called a meeting with his staff. Every one of them — the sonographer, the genetic counselors, the schedulers — supported abortion rights, but all confessed their growing unease with reductions to a singleton. “There’s no medical justification in a normal twin pregnancy to reduce to one,” Wapner said. “So we decided to allocate our resources to those who would get the most benefit. We were in the business to improve pregnancy outcomes, and those reductions didn’t fit the criteria.” He hasn’t done an elective two-to-one reduction since."~ Ruth Padawer, "The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy"


I'd definitely consider myself pro-choice but damn this article was upsetting.

My brothers are (identical) twins and, though for various reasons I hope I dodge that particular bullet with my future child-bearing, I cannot imagine someone choosing to kill a healthy twin fetus for any reason other than the evidence-based reduction of serious medical risk.

Yet, I also feel that people who choose to continue high-risk multiple IVF pregnancies without fetal reduction are insane. "God" didn't get you pregnant with 8 babies, some malpracticing, turkey-baster-happy doctor did.

I don't know if it's really possible to reconcil those perspectives adequately.

And here everyone thought the most difficult ethical baby-related decisions of the future would involve "Gattaca"-style genetic selection of embryos for health, beauty and smarts.

Some thoughts on toddlers:

• Who is this PERSON and what the fuck did they do with my baby?!
• Really?You still want to nurse to sleep every night? You can put on your own shoes, talk on the telephone, kiss your stuffed monkey good night, sing part of the alphabet song, name most of the characters from Sesame Street, tell me how old you'll be soon (2!) and climb the big kid section of the playground. Can I get my boobs back soon please?
• That noise you make when you're bored or frustrated. Yup, that noise. That noise makes me want to drink heavily and punch myself in the face. More words, less noise.
• Where the hell did you learn all these words?! How did you know that the plastic letter you just handed me is a "W"? When did you memorize the last line of your favourite book?
• It's 11PM. Still not tired eh?
• It's 5AM, why/how are you so happy and awake?
• Despite what you may be convinced, the refrigerator is not really an entertainment device.
• So, when you said "orange" for 2 minutes straight, you didn't mean you actually wanted an orange.
• When you walked past and made your monkey wave "bye-bye" to us as you went around the corner, I was pretty sure my heart would actually explode with the cute overload.
• Is it normal/healthy for a kid to love being hung upside down and swung around by the ankles that much? Perhaps you'll have a successful career in the circus.
• Watching you walk up and down the stairs by yourself is the most terrifying thing I've ever experienced.
• The potty: not just a cool place to hang out with your pants off.
• Shit, I'm really going to have to start cleaning up my language if you keep repeating what I say like that.
• Yes, yes I would like a hug and a chat about the eating antics of very hungry caterpillars.

Recently my little brothers teamed up with a couple of friends to relay-run the "Canadian Death Race".


They managed to finish 16th out of 256 teams. And lose a few toenails.

It sounded completely insane (i.e., no water stations, very limited medical or emergency support, etc.). Apparently the legal waiver was biblical.

And, so help me, though it goes against all of my lazy, self-preservation, intact-toenail-loving instincts, I'm kinda envious and considering trying to con some friends into doing it next year.

Anyone interested?

I'm giving myself a gold star for my efforts to do fun stuff this summer.


Of course, it's been at the expense of my blogging. And, I also have to give thanks to the weather which has been largely very cooperative this summer. For once.

Despite not being organized enough to plan ahead properly, or even make a summer "bucket list" (other than this post), so far we've managed to:

• spend lots of time hanging out on the deck and letting the kid run around the yard naked
• go camping in New York (reasonable prices, ok sites, nice beach for kids, watch the sand/gravel fleas thought: those f*&kers really bite)
• bike along the Ottawa River to Westboro Beach (nice ride, very meh swimming: we had to hit the kid's pool after we got home to get properly refreshed)
• try Pascal's Ice Cream (expensive but very very good with awesome flavours)
• bike along the Rideau River to Hog's Back (it was raining but it was still a really nice ride)
• hike in Gatineau Park and then swim at Meech Lake twice (damn but I love that lake)
• have a walk, dinner, drinks and dessert in Wakefield
• spend two weekends at friend's cottages (cottage-crashing = the best of both worlds)
• make and eat: fresh strawberry pie, cherry cake, chocolate-chip zucchini cake, pancakes with strawberries and whipped cream, and basically a million other things to take advantage of all the fresh food
• make the rounds of our local parks, wading pools and splash pads
• hit the Vanier Market (sadly, I think I was more impressed by the goats! and cow! than the kid. Silly jaded babies)
• bit the fear-of-entertaining-large-groups bullet and hosted a Canada Day BBQ. Now I'm in the process of planning (read: panicking about) a pig roast for the end of August "Birthday Week"?

I'm sure there's some other stuff I'm forgetting but now I'm really starting to panic about that pig roast. Off to do some googling...

I'm pretty sure that in the 6 or so years since I made my final escape from the pricey clutches of post-secondary education, my IQ has dropped 60 points.


Not that I'm claiming I was ever Mensa material. I'm very fond of telling people that the biggest predictor of success in university is the ability to sit your ass in a chair for hours on end. I am a Master of the Art and Science of sitting still, memorizing and regurgitating.

Mensa status aside, I used to love reading just about anything and everything. However, despite what my resume says about my apparent ability to focus on the written word, these days I have the attention span of a gnat for anything substantially beyond the length of an average magazine article. Most especially, nonfiction.

When I first graduated, I thought my complete aversion to all things lengthy and nonfiction was merely a sign of burnout. I figured it would just take me a while to get back into reading "real" books. I'm starting to think that I need to end the denial.

I've often tried to place the blame on how poorly-written most nonfiction is. So many nonfiction writers focus on facts at the expense of developing the story and engaging the reader. Others spend 500-1000 pages beating a thesis to death (Jared Diamond, I'm looking at you).

Alas, with the current book I'm attempting to read, I cannot make the author or the subject my scapegoat. As an writer, Simon Winchester is one of those disgustingly brilliant, witty and eloquent intellectual storytellers who could make a tale about the history of the invention of the cure for jock-itch interesting. And reading about earthquakes is way more appealing than jock-itch.

So now I'm starting to entertain suspicions that I have some sort of academically-induced brain damage. The principle symptom being that apparently all my mind is good for anymore is absorbing every sordid plot point of serial pulp vampire novels.

Perhaps, just like the emerging research on football players, in the future scientists will find out that university education causes brain trauma. Maybe someone will even write a book about it. And, if they turn that book into a movie involving sexy young vampires, I just may be able to sit through it.