I think I’m approaching a place — if not quite of zen-like serenity — of at least calm acceptance and lessening anxiety. [Oh god, there are not one, but two flies in this office. They keep landing on my hands as I type and buzzing around my face and I cannot manage to swat them. Om.] Partially, this is because I’m 35 weeks tomorrow which is really the home stretch, so I had bloody-well start accepting things.
Part of it is because we have managed to clear out and paint the third bedroom and located most of our newborn apparatuses (apparati?). I’ve also been relieved of the bulk of my paid work which kind of sucks because there goes the bulk of my income. But it’s also kind of a relief because I no longer have to worry about working ahead and figuring out how to cram a newborn into my already hectic WAHM schedule. This means I’ll have most of September to seriously clean, organize, nest and otherwise get ready for baby. (It also means I’ll be posting more here and including more PR and sponsored posts — heads up! — and writing more elsewhere too, eventually.)
I think part of it is also that I’ve been feeling better. There are still aches and pains, but the alarming, mobility-robbing pains I was having in my pelvis throughout the second half of my second trimester are much less severe. This could just be because I’ve been trying to do less and have learned what will cause a flare up and what helps with one. Who knows? Or maybe knowing that the birth is around the corner means I’m less concerned about coping with achy ligaments and trick hips for a just few more weeks.
I’ve even taken the time to sit quietly at night and feel the baby moving and squirming and kicking me in the ribs. (Either that or punching me; we’re not a hundred per cent sure if this babe’s head down yet.) I’m trying to relish these last weeks and days of being pregnant, looking down in awe at how my body has accommodated a growing baby and more than a few extra pounds of maternal fat stores. I’m anticipating what it will be like to hold a newborn baby once again and enjoying watching the older kids get more and more excited as the due date nears. This will likely be the last time I get to do this, so it’s nice to be able to live in the moment.
35 weeks. We're all just pretending now that my shirt meets my pants, okay?
The temperature was dropping as we set out from our modest three-bedroom, semi-detached house on one of Toronto’s main arteries. We quickly passed through the little square of patio stones that serves as our backyard, hopped into our car and turned into thick, bumper-to-bumper traffic. Still, we made it to the lake shore in less than 20 minutes.
The cool breeze off the lake had us second-guessing our late-evening swimming plans at Sunnyside’s free pool, so it was just as well that we had the hours mixed up and the pool was closing when we got there. I quickly ducked into the public washroom in the historic Sunnyside Pavilion while Ed and the kids went off to skip rocks.
That's me holding Irene at Sunnyside this past spring.
Next up was climbing the two painted concrete dinosaurs and letting the kids ride their bikes around the empty wading pool while I planted my pregnant self on a bench, watching the sun set over the lake.
Across the wading pool from us was a family celebrating a birthday in the park. They asked Ed for a light for the candles as soon as the sun went down and then insisted that we join them for cake. My kids happily sat up at the picnic table with very generous slices (never mind that they’d already had dessert) and I talked to the mother of four about the baby we’re expecting and how nice it is to be able to celebrate birthdays in a public park for free.
We drove back home that night feeling utterly at peace with nature and our city and especially her citizens.
Contrast that with the picture painted in Philip Preville’s cover story of the current issue of Toronto Life. It’s a profile of a handful of elite, privileged families who trade in their city homes for exquisite mansions on sprawling properties in small towns outside the GTA. They are dubbed “The New Suburbanites” and it’s just a matter of time, so the article argues, before there is a great exodus of young families fleeing Toronto’s cold, crowded and over-priced neighbourhoods.
First, let’s remember that towns like Uxbridge and Creemore and Dundas are not, in fact, suburbs at all. They are independent communities and most of the people featured in the article don’t even make a daily commute into Toronto. (Or if they do it’s a $30 per day VIA rail trip replete with after work wine tastings.) Preville even takes a pot shot at the actual suburbs, describing them as, “the cookie-cutter, aluminum-clad, cul-de-sacky, Mississaugish, soulless wasteland of the downtown imagination.” Never mind that for most working families looking to gain some square footage and a bigger backyard, those actual suburban municipalities are their only feasible choice.
But what about those bigger backyards? What’s so bad about raising kids in the city anyway? One mother quoted in Preville’s article describes the seemingly next-to-impossible chore of packing “diapers, bottles, snacks, changes of clothes, all that stuff,” only to have to rush back home from the park for lunch. Huh? I have never packed more than a water bottle and some sunscreen (and even then only on very hot days) for a short 30 to 60 minute trip to the park. If you are going to bother taking all that other crap, then of course you pack some lunch, too. I can even walk to half a dozen different parks in under 20 minutes and pick up dinner on the way home.
So sure you get more floor space for your buck outside the city, but good luck popping out for some decent Indian take-out — or Thai or Chinese or Greek or Italian or Mexican or late-night burgers with greasy onion rings. Good luck going out to see a show, indulging in a couple cocktails, flagging a cab on the street and making it home within half an hour. Or aren’t parents supposed to do that sort of thing? Are we just supposed to head home from work and never go anywhere (save the odd Tupperware party) ever again?
As for the community you’re supposed to get in smaller towns compared to the cold anonymity of the city, I think you pretty much get what you put in no matter where you are. I frequent many of the businesses in my neighbourhood and always have warm exchanges with the shop owners and staff. I am positive that any number of them would and do keep an eye out for the neighbourhood children. I’m also likely to know two or three parents at my closest park at any given time that I can count on for support. My neighbours on either side have given us food and we’ve invited them into our home. Our kids play together and when they are out in our little backyard I know there are extra sets of eyes on them at all times.
There’s a safety fallacy when it comes to the suburbs and small towns. Sure, there’s less traffic on most streets, but contrast that with more SUVs backing over small children in driveways. You are just as likely to fall victim to a freak child abduction in a small community as you are a large one. In fact, when my children are old enough to venture out a little on their own, they will know that the businesses that line the streets of our neighbourhood are their refuge. If you get lost or scared you can always go into a store to ask for help. And they’ll be less likely to get lost in the woods or fall into a ravine, too.
I won’t even get into the benefits of walking versus having to drive everywhere for everything. I’ll barely mention the freedom that being able to walk or take the TTC will afford my kids when they get a little older (and the time that will save me). Let’s not talk about culture and the rich alternatives to drinking and drugs and teenaged sex that are available to city kids every single day. (Even if they don’t always choose them.) Ultimately, though, where Preville claims that, “space is, in fact, the best thing money can buy,” I will always choose time. Those countless hours on our soul-sucking highways would just kill me.
But to each his own. I know I’m a pretty hard-core city girl and not everyone is going to agree with me on all counts. (Nor should they.) I grew up in Toronto for the most part (save for one year in Halifax and one in the Bronx) and went to high school right downtown. When Ed and I decided to start shopping around for our house, we didn’t have anywhere near the budget most homes in our neighbourhood were going for. So we bought a run-down semi on a major street and continue to sink untold hours and bucket-loads of cash into it. For us, it’s worth every penny and every drop of sweat to be where we want to be. Of course, I also know several families who have traded their homes for the promise of greater, greener and less urban meadows — and a few who have managed to move back.
Here in the Junction there are two brand new condo towers that are filled with families of four or five living in small two and a half bedroom units. These families are only too happy to claim a few hundred square feet of Toronto real estate for themselves. They have everything they need right here: parks, schools, libraries, recreation centres, shops, restaurants, you name it. One mother of two told me she was on the fence about going for baby number three. I asked if there would be room for a third in her condo and she shrugged, “In Poland, you would have two generations in a space that size.”
So, yes, we live in more cramped quarters and have to take our birthday parties to the park. But maybe we’re the better for it. Of course, those who do leave are pretty invested in convincing us (and themselves) otherwise. As Preville says, “Once you move out of the city, it becomes almost impossible to move back. Just as everyone who leaves Toronto makes a nice killing on the real estate transaction, everyone who returns gets killed. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.”
Note: It has come to my attention that my husband has also written a rebuttal to this same Toronto Life article. He even leads with the same anecdote. His platform is much bigger than mine and his response has already been making the rounds. Here is the link: http://www.thegridto.com/city/opinion/a-suburb-by-any-other-name/ I’m about to go read it now, but rest assured that any similarities are purely coincidental. And also maybe the product of our co-habitation and incessant talking about the piece over the weekend.
The kids were clamouring for dessert and, quite frankly, I didn’t know what I was going to do with them for the rest of the evening. We’ve slipped into a much later summer bedtime and I was on my own as Ed was stuck working late. So I grabbed a buy one, get one free coupon to the Cold Stone Creamery and announced we were heading out for ice cream.
Irene ordered “pink” and Colum ordered chocolate as per usual and I shared a bit from each of them. It is good. Not cheap, but good. Then we got back into the car and I asked how they liked their ice cream.
Colum: “Pice cream!”
Irene: “No, Colum. It’s ice cream. N R E, ice.”
Colum: “That’s not how you spell ice!”
That’s right, my girl. Fake it ’till you make it.
Now I leave you with an attempt at an artsy shot of my rounded silhouette:
When Colum was just a couple months old, we were at my in-laws’ enjoying a big meal around a couple tables in the backyard. I think Colum was asleep in his stroller. When he woke up I told Ed that I was going to bring him inside to change and feed him and asked him to please, please make sure my plate wasn’t cleared because I wasn’t finished eating yet. Do you see where this is going?
Image courtesy http://saltyspoon.com
I returned outside to find Ed kibitzing with his siblings in the driveway and all the plates cleared from the table. I was livid. I was probably too livid and Ed’s aunt felt very badly about clearing the table. Of course it wasn’t her fault. Of course I wasn’t upset with her. I was upset with the person, the co-parent of my breastfed infant, who’s primary parenting duty (or so it seemed to me at the time) was simply to make sure my fucking plate wasn’t cleared from the table.
There really was hardly anything left on my plate, people tried to reassure me. I knew there was hardly anything left on my plate — that’s why I was afraid it might get cleared away. That’s why I specifically asked someone to make sure it didn’t get cleared away. Because it would not be obvious to an outside observer how important it was for me to eat those last few bites of the only proper sit-down meal I’d had in weeks.
Fast forward about five years and I am still being interrupted at meal times. Spilled drinks and refills of milk and requests for specific types of cutlery and trips to the bathroom to wipe various people’s bums and, hey, let’s spill another glass of milk! I don’t bother getting annoyed by all of that. I’d be miserable if I let it get to me. I expect to have to do my best impression of a human yo-yo getting up and down from the dinner table every night. (I don’t even bother trying to sit down for breakfast and lunch.) But it does mean that it takes me a while to get through a meal.
So when twice this past week well-meaning people have cleared my plate assuming I was finished, I couldn’t blame them. It looked like I was mostly done, after all. There were probably only a few bites left. Of course, if anyone really paid attention they’d see that I was still mid-bite when I was called from the table yet again to tend to some pressing matter or other. There wasn’t much left, yes, but I still wanted to eat it all.
Is it too much to ask, not that I eat a meal uninterrupted, but that I get a chance to finish it at all? It probably is. And come the end of September when baby number three arrives on the scene, I probably shouldn’t even bother trying.
1. They’re tricky. The prime bubble-enjoyment ages are probably between 12 months and 6 years which is still (often) too young to be able to master the art of making decent bubbles. So that means I have to stand there waving the bloody bubble wand around which is fun for maybe half an hour out of the year, max. (Although an older kid willing to hang in your backyard making bubbles for the tots is kind of sweet.)
2. There will be spills. Invariable the little kid who has been chasing the bubbles around will want to start making them for him/herself. “Let me try, Mommy! Let me try!” And you will cave — or the older kid will — and you will duly caution your child to just please be very careful. And then the soapy liquid will be all over the ground in five minutes flat, guaranteed.
3. There will be tears. No matter how you play it, bubbles never really make anyone happy. They are a shiny distraction from the big old ball of nothing that’s inside them. You can not let your kid try making bubbles and make them cry that way. Or you can let them cry tears of frustration because they can’t do it themselves no matter how hard they try. Either way, they’ll cry when all the bubble stuff gets spilled.
4. Good luck keeping that stuff together. So say you want to go ahead and play with some bubbles anyway because perhaps you are suffering from amnesia or maybe you’re a bit of a masochist. Let’s imagine, even, that you think the three and a half minutes of fun before the tears and the tantrums start are worth it. Okay, fine. Unless you make a special trip to the store to buy new bubble stuff each time, you will never find both wands and soap in the same place at the same time. Come on, it can’t be just me, right?
5. They aid in childhood abductions. (Or they could.) I’m not one to leech off of a parents worst fear, but the number of times I’ve almost lost a child in a crowded place because they’re chasing after some bubbles is ridiculous. It’s those stupid bubble guns vendors are now selling every place that caters to families and even some that don’t. The Beaches Jazz Festival? Really? Now these musicians have to compete with the AK47 of bubble guns, too? It’s not fair.
I’ve got a checklist a mile long to get through in the next three months. I have to reach for a paper bag just typing that. I’m having a baby in three months and I don’t even know where my Moby Wrap is or my breast pump or any of the baby clothes. And what about a snowsuit? Won’t it need a snowsuit?!
Still, through the power of obsessive fretting, I have managed to cross a couple biggies off my list lately.
Number 1, the car seat. Yes, my dear friends, I figured out how to squeeze three car seats across. Behold:
I especially love how when I shared this picture on Facebook all the mothers of three were astounded. My husband, on the other hand, doesn’t quite seem to understand the feat of engineering involved. Engineering and hours of internet research on which brands of car seats would fit best. From left to right you have the original Britax Marathon that we bought for Colum and Irene now uses — it’s huge. Then there’s a Sunshine Kids Radian, the slimmest car seat on the market, and a Chicco Keyfit, among the skinniest infant bucket seats. It’s a tight squeeze and replacing the Marathon with another Radian or a booster seat was my contingency plan if this didn’t fit. I may try putting the bucket seat in the middle so I can recline the driver’s seat a tad more, but I’m afraid it will be too snug to snap the bucket seat in and out of the base easily. Whatever, it’s done!
Number 2, air conditioning. Do you remember last summer? Do you? Because I do. I remember day after day, week after week, of unbearable heat. There was just no break. You can usually count on a couple weeks worth of serious heat wave in a Toronto July, but last year it was the whole month and August, too. The main floor of my house was a warm and sticky mess and I mostly just flopped around barely able to function. The second floor was like the furnace of hell. We put our one portable air conditioner in the kid’s bedroom and ran it overnight and sprawled out ourselves before a multitude of fans. Never again, I said. Never again. That brings us to this summer, during which I will be enjoying the third trimester of my third pregnancy, and we still had no a/c! Until yesterday. Cue the angels singing, please.
Now I only have to get Colum to the dentist and the doctor, get Ed to get his driver’s license so that I am not the only chauffeur this family has, clean out all the junk in the basement “office” (including a fridge and a stove), move all the actual office stuff from the unfinished third bedroom upstairs, finish the bloody room and figure out what baby gear I have and where it is. Why do they not put GPS’s on Moby Wraps?!
Oh, and I have to do all of this while taking care of my other two kids (remember them?) full time and doubling the number of work hours I put in from home so that I might get ahead enough to actually take a couple of months off when this bambino arrives.
And I get to be very pregnant while I do it. That means that on top of being tired and slow, I will also be completely irrational and you will likely find me on my hands and knees meticulously cleaning under the stove instead. Because of course.
Today was Pizza Day at Colum’s school. I love Pizza Day with all my heart because it means I don’t have to make him lunch at 11:15am since he’ll eat when he gets to school.
So my plan was to walk Colum to the bus stop and then continue into the Junction to pick up pizza slices from Vesuvios for Irene and I. How could this plan possibly fail me?
Well, as we were walking together and pushing the empty stroller, I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my abdomen. It must be gas, I thought, but boy did it hurt. It also seemed to have triggered a Braxton Hicks contraction and I felt my entire midsection tighten up. I had to stop walking until it passed. We then continued around the corner when it happened again: a sharp stabbing accompanied by a tightening sensation. This time I actually knelt on the sidewalk while waiting for it to pass. Irene knelt down beside me.
This couldn’t be a contraction, could it? Nah. I’m only 22 weeks along. The baby’s not even viable yet. I always go into labour at 39.5 weeks, everybody knows that. Even if it does turn out to be something, I thought, the midwives and doctors will be able to stop it. Sure. There’s no reason to panic . . . unless I have to go on bed rest! Who would take care of the kids then? We would be so utterly and completely screwed.
I pulled myself together and tried to continue walking again when I felt a familiar urge. “Irene, get in the stroller because we need to go home right away. Mommy needs to poo.”
Ahem. So yeah, everything’s fine. No contractions, no labour, no bed rest. Just some killer gas pains/bowel movement and ill-timed Braxton Hicks.
I finally had my 20-week anatomical scan last Friday and it’s good news all around. There is one (singular) baby residing in my womb who scored straight normals on all counts. Seriously. Head shape: normal; profile: normal; abdominal wall: normal; genitalia: normal. I hope this kid knows that this is the last time it will get away with pulling this average crap. Not one excellent on the entire page. Pshaw.
The truth is, though, that I still cannot get over the fact that there is a little human in there. This is my third baby and my fourth ultrasound and I still do a double take the first time the tech says, “There’s your baby.” I don’t know what exactly I’m expecting. By 20 weeks I know it’s not going to look like a tadpole anymore, but I still think it’s going to be some sort of sea monkey-type creature. But no! It’s a human baby. Only one human baby and a healthy-looking one at that. Fucking A, as they say.
We didn’t find out the gender, of course, because everyone knows only the weak and morally inferior need to know their baby’s sex. *Break to guzzle Coca Cola and unwrap my second McDonald’s cheeseburger.*Burp. As I was saying, I’m still kind of in denial about this whole third kid thing and finding out the sex is just bound to make it all feel so much more real and imminent — which it is not! This pregnancy is scheduled to continue for at least another four months and I intend to enjoy our mutual anonymity while it lasts.
