air conditioning – Rebecca Cuneo Keenan

An incomplete and privileged, a/c-owning point of view.

1. Stay inside with the air conditioning. This basically translates into do nothing when you have three kids. We have had to walk to and from the local Ontario Early Years Centre because some genius thought it would be “fun” and “a break” to enroll Irene in a drop-off kindergarten readiness program. If walking through 40+ degree Celsius with the humidex weather mid-day is your idea of fun and folding half a basket of laundry while running after a baby is your idea of a break, well then I was right.

2. Try not to cook. Much. Obviously you don’t want to be roasting turkeys in a heat wave, but it can be a challenge to avoid using the stove altogether. Our barbecue is leaking propane, for example, so that’s not an option. (And, really, standing outside over a hot barbecue is about as appealing as crawling into an oven these days.) Cold meats and cereals and salads can get you part of the way, but mama’s on a budget and the family pack of chicken breasts at the local supermarket was too good a deal to pass on. So I roasted them all late one night and then had cooked chicken for sandwiches and salads for two days. Totally worth turning on the oven. Also, microwaves and slow cookers are your friends.

3. Bribe kids with popsicles. Everyone’s hot and tired and pent up, so the kids are going to act out. My own patience is especially short when I’m hot and it’s not the time to worry about teaching new behaviours. A freezer full of cold treats (home made or otherwise) will be the perfect prize for getting the kids to clean up or sit down or shut up or GET OFF YOUR BROTHER, how many times do I have to tell you?!

4. Do go out in the evenings, if you can. The kids do still need to run around and get some exercise. I need a break from looking at the mess and stressing over emails. Letting them loose at a park (bonus points if there’s a wading pool or splash pad that’s still open or if it’s near a body of water) will do wonder for everybody’s sanity. It will also help them sleep. Clutch! Alas, yesterday was too much of a pressure cooker to even do that so we just went out for ice cream in an air conditioned environment and then came home for bed.

5. Pray it will end. All heat waves do come to an end, eventually. It looks like we’ll be getting a break in the next couple days, for example, not that I can even enjoy it looking at the never-ending long-term forecast of temperatures over 30 Celsius. I may have to add a few more points to this list in the coming days. Hang at the mall is a gimme, if only that didn’t require getting there. Wonder how long they’ll let us dawdle in the frozen food section of the supermarket? Six, seven, eight hours? I didn’t think so.

Any pointers, dear readers?

The Baby’s Coming Fret List

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.