baby it’s cold outside

Cold enough for you? Yeah, thought so.

It’s a frosty minus twenty something where we live and a few degrees colder than that where we are for this most glorious of holidays. Spent the last almost-a-week in Saskatchewan enjoying the merriment and fun of a holiday season and eating way too much turkey and drinking way too much coffee and opening way too many presents and generally living in the land of way too much. It’s a great place to go for a visit but I wouldn’t want to live here because of course along with way too much turkey comes way too much coffee comes way too much indigestion.

Today was the Olfert to do and that usually means snowmobiles and boot hockey. Today the snowmobiles happened and my boys took their first ever spin on a roaring old machine while Trevor and Jeb’s modern wonders zipped around us. Ben drove the thing a little and three boys who are used to being their own motors got a fleeting taste of the wonderful and blue-tinged-exhaust filled world of two stroke motors. I hope they didn’t like it too much because I won’t be buying one of those any time soon but I hope they liked it a little because otherwise my family might disinherit me. It was cold though and one spin across the field was enough for aching toes and bright red cheeks and a sudden and overwhelming wish for hot chocolate and coffee.

Contrast that with yesterday’s fun that had Wiens types outside with shovels making piles of snow and digging through snowbanks and grandpa being the only guy on the block to run his snowblower through his garden because hey, how else is one going to get good snow to make an igloo? The igloo went up today while I was away and we’ll hollow out the quincee (quinzhee? quinzee? Never know how to spell that.) tomorrow and finish the tunnel through the drift. You know, for the kids;).

So it’s all fun and games and good coffee for another day or two and then home again home again. No proper plans for a week after that though we’d all like to get some skiing in and I keep after Nik to come and slide with us. I figure this is her window, by next year or the year after she won’t be able to keep up with her kids anymore so it’s time to put up or bring a book and sit in the lodge.

So it’s cold out there but we won’t let that stop us from enjoying the big wide world. I’ll put up some outside pictures in the next day or two. I hope it’s been a Merry Christmas for you and yours and I hope you have some killer plans for the New Year. Stay warm eh?

right where we want them

Got the boys pretty much right where we want them these days. Jonah’s tantrums still march ominously into our lives from time to time but they can more or less be subverted with a few well placed words and Ben’s (ahem) “heightened sensitivity” (which is a careful way of saying crying about everything) has subsided somewhat as he develops the ability to recognize and sometimes even join in on his parents jokes. Sam is still Sam and he more or less trots down the trail of life at his own pace and apart from the whole “wrong side of the bed” routine that plays itself out in our house one or two mornings a week, he gets through life on his charms seems to do so happily and without too much objection.

Yup, it’s under control out here in the woods and that feels good. Almost like we might be doing this parenting thing at some sort of passing level. Here’s hoping.

It strikes me this week that the stages your kids hit blend together in this seamless sort of way that makes it hard to recognize the boundaries between them. We don’t change diapers anymore and we don’t wipe bums anymore and now I don’t pack snacks anymore or even feed pets with my own hands. All of this requires the usual amount of shepherding and cueing and reminding but the boys are quite capable in many areas of life and this makes every day so much easier.

And this, very much to my surprise, makes me sad.

For the first time since the birth of our twins I am looking at babies again with more than a shudder and a thought of “thank heavens that thing doesn’t live at my house.” For the first time since that fateful fall of 2007 I am starting to look back with something like fondness or reminiscence or wistfulness. This is weird.

Thing is some of these milestones have passed for us and we won’t be there again and while it’s easy to be thankful about sleeping through the night and all the good things that come with older kids it’s just as easy to forget how hard the other stuff is. A good friend posted a picture that featured our two little monsters less than a year old and it gave me some pangs I did not believe myself capable of. The first year of Sam and Jo’s existence in our house is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and not something I look to repeat but then (I’ve already written about that here) somehow I miss it. Isn’t life the strangest thing?

So as quickly as we see our kids entering new stages they are just as quickly leaving old ones. As important as it is that we hold on to the memories of those times past I suppose the challenge for us now is to keep a keen eye to the times present. Babies are cute, but so are 8 and 5 and 5 year olds.

There will be no more babies in our house and that’s sad but also ok. We have nephews and maybe someday nieces that need us to play a role and we will take that role and run with it.

…

Today is the Cremona Community Christmas Concert and all three of our boys have a role, Ben the pianist and Sam and Jo with the preschool choir. Then it’s off to fun hockey and tomorrow is another day of another week so rinse and repeat I suppose. I’ll enjoy the music and the sport today but tonight, after the boys are in bed and quiet, I’ll likely take some time to look at some pictures of some of those stages we have passed.

the hunting of a tree

The tree slayers, victorious!

We jam our weekends full. It seems we aren’t happy about having something scheduled for Saturday so instead we pile a whole lot of somethings into the weekend and the result is a two day whirlwind that always leaves me doubled over and panting to catch my breath on Sunday night and looking forward to having a nice quiet Monday at work.

This weekend included Christmas shopping and a few hours of work at the Cremona Winter Festival and grocery shopping and a visit from in-laws and attending Church on the first day of Advent and cutting the Christmas tree and fun hockey and setting up the Christmas tree. In no particular order. See? Full.

And here I am, catching my breath once again. Man it will be nice to get back into the office.

Story of the weekend? Likely it has to be the Christmas tree. We cut our own tree each year and we do it here at camp. Now we have beautiful evergreens here but they are white spruce and while white spruce grow tall and majestic they don’t tend to grow thick. They are, in fact, the least Christmas-tree-like of all the evergreens and tend to grow long trunks with the green starting about 3/4 of the way up and then kind of tufting out like Zeus’s trufulas. Add the fact that it’s an old growth forest and most of the trees top 60 feet and the little ones starve for sun and you get these tall, gangly things that stretch for light and don’t put branches anywhere they won’t convert sunlight into precious energy.

And that is a long way of excusing the fact that our Christmas trees tend to be kind of awful.

In years past we would spend a few glorious September days wandering around and picking out potential trees and even farming trees for the future (cutting down the little ones to thin the competition). Before you go thinking that I hate nature, know that the forest is constantly pushing on it’s boundaries and if we didn’t cut these things it wouldn’t be too long before we were playing field games in something that once was a field but is now full of trees. Anyway we used to find the trees that we liked best and flag them for future reference but this was all in the halcyon days when we had this little thing called “lots of free time” and not in the postakidalyptic days that we find ourselves in now where the level of daily intensity teeters along a line between “We’re busy, but it’s a good busy” and “I SAID I’LL DO IT IN A MINUTE” and taking the time to wander around looking for Christmas trees seems to be… less of a priority.

So anyway we end up trudging through snow. For days. So we can look at every tree God saw fit to put in this little patch of creation only to pick the very first one we looked at and cut it down and drag it home. Then we trim the thing to size and set it up and Nikki berates it thoroughly and then we put lights and angels and bells and balls on and declare it beautiful. Charlie Brown has taught us well.

Anyway we have a Christmas tree now. Not as pathetic as last year’s (which Nik cruelly deemed “the worst one yet”) and not as good as some other years. Just quietly lit up and giving a warm glow to the room. It is a nice thing to sit beside while I catch my breath.