Cabin Girl and Mr. Monkey have birthdays 4 days apart. Awesome planning on my end. We decided that this year, to make things simpler (HA!), we would do a combined birthday party for them. But, how to combine a birthday for a 7 year old girly-girl and a 2 year old rough and tumble toddler boy?
The answer, my friends, is in Never Neverland.
The birds are chirping and the sun is warming your face. Green grass is peeking through. The smell of spring is in the air. You step back into your lovely home and suddenly notice all the winter dust and disorder peeking from multiple rooms around the house. As you walk from room to room there are house cleaning needs to be addressed in each room. You can no longer ignore what the winter clouds hid from your view.
As mothers, as we have more children, the likelihood of needing emergency medical care increases. Despite all of our work to keep them safe, toddlers fall, they get sick, and they eat things they’re not supposed to. Getting to the hospital can be a trial on its own – but when you’re there, you want to be sure that you have everything you need to make it easier. Even though medical care has advanced, you need to be prepared for a long wait in a harsh, sterile environment. Considering how difficult it is to take a toddler to the corner store, some advance preparation will be required.
You’ve always wanted to try but have shied away. You see the pictures of your friends and family holding race bibs and posting about their latest training run. Why does it seem so hard to just start running? Trust me, I’ve had this conversation in my head many times. Do I want it? Do I want to be a runner?
Caring for a newborn takes gargantuan effort, patience and sheer physical strength. Before I had my daughter, I had no idea how much of myself I would have to give, and give, and give. There was no room left for anything, no me time, no us time, no time, period.
April Fools’ Day is quickly approaching and my family is plotting. Alliances are being formed (and broken), plans made, and supplies collected. In this family, we definitely like to pull April Fools’ Days pranks on one another. We fully support the children joking around as long as pranks are done in kindness, not at someone’s expense, and don’t leave complete destruction in the wake of the prank. And as always, I find the family friendly benefit to joking with each other.
To cope with toddler behavior it helps to remember the basic principle of developmental discipline: the drive that babies have to develop is the same one that creates discipline challenges. That’s why sometimes toddlers are hard to discipline.
After just returning from the Philippines, and having traveled to several countries less fortunate than Canada over the past few years, I can’t stop thinking about the effect of food on the health of a community. In Liberia, for instance, citizens had access to potatoes, fish, coconuts and chicken but scarcely few fruits and vegetables. Last week in the Philippines I witnessed intense poverty, but the prevalence of fruit trees, rice fields (photo below) and meats made the communities far less taxed and happier. Even in our thriving country of Canada, we have some severe food shortages. From now on, we should think about how to ‘feed it forward’.
I’m not sure where the idea started that women should lie about their age—or at what age you should start lying. Once at a grad school party I announced that I was 30.
A colleague spit out his drink as his mouth gaped in shock, “Oh my God! I had no idea.”
He was 26.
I remember that I was carrying my infant daughter, wrapped tightly to me as I wandered through a church bazaar when a voice said, “What a beautiful baby!”
I thought so, of course, but it was nice to hear it from a stranger, so I turned and thanked the person behind the voice. I don’t remember what she looked like, but I want to judge her, in retrospect – in my mind, her perfectly coiffed, single-hue dye job was oversprayed, her skin showed the damage from too many tanning booths and she wore too much expensive, cloying cologne – but I really don’t know. She looked into my baby’s beautiful eyes and returned her bright, cheerful smile – and then looked at me and said “You’re going to keep her thin and pretty, right?”