A day of simple pleasures

Ahhhh, Saturday. Misty, rainy, lazy Saturday. And my last lazy Saturday for a while, methinks, considering baby Lowry version 2.0 is due on Wednesday. Yowzah!

So I took advantage of a day with no real schedule and did a whole lot of nothing. Jade slept in until 8am - usually she's a 7-7:30am kind of girl - so we had a leisurely breakfast while Daddy got a rare chance to snooze.

Then I left Jady with Daddy and headed off for a massage. I can't say enough about the rub-down arts; I recommend massage to anyone and everyone. Even if you don't think you have aches and pains or knots and tight spots, trust me: a good massage therapist will find 'em and fix 'em. I felt like a new woman after my session today.

After my rub-down, I meandered over to the farmer's market that pops up with ten or twelve stalls every saturday by the pavilion. It's nothing like the St. Jacob's market I used to frequent in my Waterloo days, a sprawling venture that's become more commercial every year. The Kink farmer's market is more like a little community that mushrooms up every week. It's a great place to buy locally grown veggies, not to mention baked goods and seasonal stuff. For example, today I loaded up on decorative gourds - 5 for a buck, way cheaper than the grocery store's offerings - late-season raspberries, green beans, perfect little red peppers and the most gorgeous, heavy, sweet Mennonite doughnuts...all while sipping an organic coffee from a real china cup. The Ark's stall encourages you to buy a cup of their delicious coffee and enjoy it while you shop, provided you return their cup before you leave.

I devoured my doughnut in the car, then headed back to Someday for lunch with D and Jade. (Yes, I saved a doughnut for D.) I made a simple pasta with the peppers and heirloom tomatoes I'd bought at market, along with some garlic-flavoured olive oil, onion, feta and olives. We ate it together and after lunch, D took turns feeding Jade and I the last of our Kawartha Dairies vanilla ice cream. No more until next summer!

D walked Jade up to Grandma's for the afternoon, which afforded me the chance to have a luxurious nap. I fell asleep listening to the rain trickle off the maple trees outside our bedroom window and woke up just in time to meet everyone at Grandma Lowry's for supper. On our way home, Jade and I drove down to the shore to revel in the peach-and-melon coloured sunset.

Really, a day of simple pleasures often beats a day of excitement. Especially when it contains Mennonite doughnuts!

Seasons change and so do I...

What song is that lyric from? Darned if I can remember. But that's my MO lately - absent-minded as the proverbial professor. And let's not forget clumsy and awkward while we're searching for deprecating adjectives. Yes folks, these days, I'm a real treat!

As the summer draws to a close, so do my days as a pregnant woman. We've decided that this will be our last baby, so I'm trying hard to make the most of the time I have left as a swollen-bellied waddler. I'm savouring every bump n' grind going on inside my stomach, gazing affectionatly at my inflated reflection in the mirror when I brush my teeth and enjoying my cute maternity dresses while I can. I'm trying to stay positive, put my feet up whenever possible, think me some pretty pink and blue thoughts and above all, not freak out.

Which has been a challenge, because it seems as though the moment the summer threw off its sweltering cloak of heat and humidity to reveal a moody, cloud-curdled fall sky, my pregnancy also swung itself into a distinct change. Baby has crept downward in the last week or so, and baby's latest hobby is repeatedly head-butting my pelvic region like s/he's trying to batter his/her way out. My legs have begun cramping with such fierce intensity that massage and stretching don't even help any more. I could care less about ice cream and freezies; even Coke won't whet my appetite. To top it off, I'm prone to fits of weeping for absolutely no reason while Jade watches me with a look of puzzlement. Good grief!

I keep reminding myself I only have a few weeks to go and that most of what's ahead is beyond my control. I have to trust to the goodness of the universe, the medical profession, the care of my family and friends and to my husband's steadfast love that things will be okay, no matter what happens on (or before! GAH!) September 22nd. Fingers, toes and legs crossed...

Five Things - from a preggo point of view

I know how darned lucky I am to be pregnant and relatively healthy, so far be it from me to moan and complain too much. There are so many folks who would kill to be in my situation, regardless of the sometimes unpleasant parts of pregnancy.

That being said, I feel compelled to say the following:

Five things I will deeply miss about being pregnant
1. The squirmy, kicky, hiccuppy feelings of new life swirling around in my belly.
2. How nice complete strangers are to me. Last week a guy helped me load my groceries into my car; this week two ladies stopped to tell me all about their pregnancies and how they had their kids really close together too.
3. Having boobs.(Seriously! A-cup girls will understand.)
4. The delicious, almost surreal quality sleep takes on...for the first 7 months, anyway. Sleep becomes as pleasurable and tangible as eating your favourite food.
5. Talking and singing to the little being inside me.

Five things I will be happy never to have to experience again
1. The bizarre "restless leg" syndrome that strikes every night around 3am. I feel strong urges to kick something - the bed, the covers, my husband - and I have to roll out of bed and do stretches to alleviate the weirdness.
2. Uterine cramps. Bloody hell, do they hurt! It's like baby has a little penknife and enjoys occasionally jabbing it into my abdomen. MD says I "have an educated uterus" and it's simply stretching and preparing for labour, no matter how many times I've told it we're having a C-section.
3. People who enjoy saying things like, "My God, you're huge!" or "Huh, you guys didn't wait long to get at 'er again."
4. Not being able to put cream or polish on my toes. Or pick up anything I drop. Or bend over to smell my roses.
5. The endless nightly marches to the bathroom. It's so unfair that pregnant women have the thirst of camels without the helpful storage humps.

But you know what? It's all good. Honest.

So yeah, we've got less than a month to go and no names yet. Gah! September 22nd is looming large and I am counting my blessings since I can't count my toes anymore. (0:

Sorry for the long absence from bloggy land folks. Hope all is well with y'all out in cyberspace.

Bittersweet

Last week, D was doing chores and Jady was asleep. It was still and quiet in the house and I felt lonely. So I snuck upstairs, tiptoed over to Jade's crib and did something I never do: I eased her out, tucked her into my arms, crept over to my bed and cuddled with her for an hour.

She barely stirred - thankfully she's a sound sleeper! - and it was so good to feel her warmth, her heartbeat against my breast again. She's been weaned since May, and while I don't miss the middle-of-the-night feedings, I do miss the easy intimacy nursing afforded us.

Jade is a busy girl. The only time she's content to sit in my lap without wriggling around like a fish out of water is when she's tired (or asleep!). And then I'm in Mummy heaven. Her downy blonde head smells like honey; her chubby toes curl and uncurl when I stroke them with my finger. She still sucks two fingers and sometimes she looks up at me with an undescribable expression her sapphire eyes. And to think that ten years ago, I was convinced I didn't want children...

Lying in bed with Jade the other night, I was struck to my core with a strange blend of deep joy and profound grief. I couldn't help but think of how my other two lost little ones should be there with us, cuddled in my arms with as much right to be there as Jade. So I allowed myself the luxury of closing my eyes and imagining their presence - what their scent, their warmth, their own personalities might have been like. I think those few minutes of fantasy defined the term bittersweet for me; I'm learning that so much in motherhood is exactly that.

Sanford & Son at Someday

When my older sis was here visiting at Christmas, I proudly showed her around the farm, as she'd only seen it through Facebook photos. She ooh-ed and ahh-ed over the house, the apple orchard, the proximity to both beach and river. She loved the hayloft and the old horse stalls in the barn. But when I took her to the shop, she started laughing.

"What?" I said, puzzled. "I know, it's a mess."

"It's not that," she said, still giggling. It was only when she started singing the theme song to Sandford & Son and doing her unique chicken-wing dance around the boat, motorbike, snow blower and tractor that I got it.

Sandford & Son, for those of you too young or too cultured to have ever seen it, was a show about a crusty old junk dealer who lived in a ramshackle, cluttered shop so full of "treasures" that people could hardly walk around without knocking something over. Ahem.

It seems that the more room one has, the more stuff one accumulates. After watching my sister's performance in our shop last winter, I've come to realize that the barns, garages and closets of Someday Farm are no exception. To put it bluntly, we have a lot of crap.

When I lived in the city, my house was often described by other people as "charming." When someone says this about your house, what they're really saying is that it's small and old. Charming houses have unlit, cramped closets, and cupboards too deep and too high to be used properly. Charming houses have teeny little vestibules with doll-sized spaces that laugh at your attempts to hang bulky winter gear or store your vacuum cleaner. Their garages are barely wide enough for one car, let alone bikes, sleds, lawn mowers, etc. And the backyard sheds are mostly decorative, seeing as how entering them means risking severe head injuries.

So on our first offical walk-through of Someday - before it was ours - I was delighted by the car garage, shop and two barns. I'd finally have room for my gardening implements, my skis and my BBQ! And I was over the moon about the 12 cupboards, pantry and various handy drawers in the kitchen. But the bedroom closets were horrific: a single door opened onto a long, dark hallway with a few shelves and no place to hang clothes! How did the poor previous owners LIVE?

A few discussions with our renovator gave me the closets of my dreams: double doors, excellent light, lots and lots of room to hang stuff. I was in closet heaven. We had oodles of space. In fact, we had so much space that we'd never use it all. Or so I thought.

As slow as a rising tide, my magical roomy closets began to fill up: my sister stored a few of her outfits while she went to Russia; comforters and blankets began to accumulate; and then came the mountains of baby clothes. One day I suffered a severe case of deja vu as I attempted to stuff a box into an overflowing closet. It was my house in Waterloo all over again. I'd been blaming the size of my old house for my space issues, but really, it was ME and my squirrel-like accumulation issues.

My husband is no different; his shop is piled high with a jumble of tools, errant farm equipment, defunct snowmobiles and lawn tractors. Our garage is packed full of strollers, wagons and other baby mobility equipment, offset by paint cans, snow shoes, and apple tree bug spray. It's a wild mix.

But I don't consider all our accumulations junk, no matter how many times my sister sings the Sandford & Son song to me. I don't think we've entered "hoarder" territory (yet); everything we have, we use (except for the snowmobile). When I look around at all the stuff, I swell up with a feeling of thankfulness. We have space, and we have stuff. How lucky are we?

Cheers to Mrs. S in Scotland - Aye, this post's for you!

I have a lovely bloggy friend named Mrs. S, aka Mrs. Successful. She lives in Scotland and we've been fans of each others' blogs for about a year. Mrs. S. has enlightened me on various things Scottish, including gardening in Scottish climes, Robbie Burns' poetry and "oysters" (a hideous looking ice-cream concoction). I've never been to her part of the world, so I get a kick out of reading about her life.

Ironically, I live near a town with a distinctly Scottish flavour to it. Kincardine has not one but two Scottish festivals, a Scottish shop which sells everything from bona-fide haggis to clan-accurate kilts, not to mention the weekly summer Saturday night parade where everyone turns up to march behind the town's kilt-clad bagpipe-playing band.

The first Scottish Festival took place last weekend, and it had everything: highland dance competitions, "heavy" events like caber tosses, beer gardens, authentic Scottish food booths and lots of funky vendors. AND an extra parade! I am a total sucker for parades and fireworks, and there were plenty of both with Canada Day and the festival overlapping.

Jady lady attended her very first pipe-band parade. I used to go to them when I was a kid, so I got kinda sentimental and sniffly when I heard the drone of the bagpipes coming down the street. At first, I worried that the screeching and moaning and the very loud drumming would send Jady into a fit of fear - to my thinking, bagpipes are a bit of an acquired taste - but she was riveted and literally on the edge of her stroller the whole time.

We celebrated her first Scottish parade with her very first ice cream cone, so all in all, it was a memorable, happy evening...even though we don't have a single Scottish gene in our pool, I was glad to be able to share a childhood pleasure with my own bonnie wee bairn. Now, if I can just find a kilt small enough for her next parade...

Cheers to you Mrs. S, and as they say at the Scottish Festival, "We're not away to stay away, we'll always come back and see you!"

Another meaty mishap in the kitchens of Someday

I've been bored stiff with my own cooking lately, which really isn't like me. Usually I enjoy poring over my recipe books or checking out foodie blogs for new ideas; for the past two weeks, though, I seem to have lapsed into a cooking-related funk. I have absolutely no interest in shopping, planning or preparing food. In fact, I haven't even been able to take much pleasure in eating, despite the fact that I'm always ravenous. It's a drag!

Meat has always been an uphill culinary battle for me, especially lately with my complete apathy for all things edible. Last week, I half-heartedly asked my local Sobey's butcher dude for flank steak, which a magazine article had touted as "economical and delicious," as long as it was given a good long marinade bath prior to cooking. He looked confused (he was about 17), and told me there should be some in the beef section. I found something labeled "flank marinating steak," and without really giving it the once over, popped it in my cart.

Tonight I decided to try cooking it. Imagine my confusion when I pulled the thing out of the package, ready to give it a nice soak in some garlic infused oil and vinegar, and found it had been butterflied! What the what am I supposed to do with this skanky looking thing? I thought. As I tend to do in most times of kitchen turmoil, I turned to the internet for help.

"Stuffed flank steak - easy gourmet your family will love!" gushed one website. "Impress your guests with rolled stuffed flank steak," promised another. I shrugged. It was either flank steak or a can of tomato soup with toast, so I gave it a try. I sauted spinach, onion and garlic, fished out some feta and attempted to stuff my steak.

The unrolling went okay (shudder), but rolling it back up with the tasty stuffing intact proved to be another story. I snuck another look at the recipe, which said:
"Place kitchen twine around the steak lengthwise, then at 1/2-inch intervals." Kitchen twine? I had decorative ribbon, garden nylon, twist ties and some baler twine, none of which seemed like the right choice. I was on the point of feeding the whole mess to the dog when I remembered the contents of my cocktail drawer: toothpicks! The elegant flank steak recipe was saved. Sort of.

It smelled okay. It cut nicely into pretty rounds and looked quite fashionable on the plate, nestled up to the roasted potatoes and tomato bocconcini salad. But when D tasted it, he did the nose-scrunch I've come to interpret as something being rotten in the state of Someday.

"Well, what do you think?" I asked.
D chewed meditatively for a moment, then furrowed his brow. "Is there some kind of weird spice or herb or something in this?"
"No," I said, "just spinach and onions. And salt & pepper."
He took another bite and did the nose scrunch again. "Then why does it taste like Scope?"

Dear reader, when using toothpicks to secure your next classy rolled flank steak meal, I highly recommend using the non-minty variety.

*sigh*

Now where's that damned can opener?