thanksgiving — Blog — Rowan Jetté Knox

1. THE UNKNOWN

To me, the great unknown is the emotional equivalent to having bamboo shoots hammered up my fingernails. Put another way, sitting in limbo is the poop raining down upon my happy parade, making all the clowns cry and the tuba player wishing the opening of his instrument wasn't quite so basket-like. It's my nemesis, and I've had to spend a lot of time with it the last couple of days. Spawnling's ECG was yesterday morning. We were to sit in the waiting room and the nurse was to come out after speaking with the technician to tell us how the little gremlin's heart is doing. Problem? The nurse was busy, so they sent us home to wait for her phone call. Do you have any idea how long it takes for medical professionals to get around to calling people back? I suspect we may have answers by the time Spawnling starts collecting a pension. And yes, I was one of those moms and called to let them know we were still waiting on answers. Guess what? That was about as effective as Sarah Palin teaching a sex ed class.

2. THE SIX-DAY WEEKEND

Who do I strangle at the school board for deciding to lump three PD days together and stick them before the already long Thanksgiving weekend? Now I get to listen to the cheery sounds of my children trying to kill each other for the equivalent of three back-to-back weekends. School board genius, I haven't even recovered from summer vacation yet. The twitches have stopped but the nightmares still come in droves. What were you thinking? Do you hate stay-at-home-parents? Do you envy our bonbon-eating, Ellen-watching, pyjama-wearing ways? Why must you do this? The exhaustion is already setting in after only a single day of uncooperative, un-sharing, unbridled chaos. When the turkey's tryptophan kicks in on Monday I'll probably lapse into a coma. How on earth am I supposed to experience an "a-ha moment" with Oprah in a coma?!

3. THE CLUELESS MARKETER

A) Are you serious? This is a different woman altogether.

B) There's this neat program called Photoshop that lets you edit things like skin tone. If you used it, maybe you could convince us that Miss Pasty Whitey Universe 2010 up top is the same person as Fake-Boob SprayTan below.

C) Apparently when you get skinny, you start buying bikinis with flashy stripper tassels. Good to know. I'll start saving up.

D) Oh, and another thing? Ms. Before isn't fat. She's PREGNANT. Did you also know girls have vaginas? That's where the babies come out. I'm concerned that you couldn't recognize an obvious sign of human reproduction. But take heart, my internet marketer virgin: you might still be able to have sex one day if you pay someone.

E) Your Easy Rule for losing weight? I tried it three times and it didn't work. Well, I mean, I lost weight when the baby came out (of my vagina, incidentally) but apparently sitting with your colicky baby and eating a bag of Oreos while sobbing uncontrollably doesn't make you look like a supermodel. Go figure.

What a great Thanksgiving weekend! Spawnling's birthday rocked the house and he actually sat through all but the last five minutes of a 90 minute movie. At that point he got up and looked at me defiantly in that 'I just dare you to try and make me sit'. When I whispered to him that he should sit down, he frowned, whispered 'Stupid!' in my ear and made his way up onto his dad's lap.

I could have taken him out of the theater and given him a time-out.

I could have.

I probably should have.

But onscreen there were giant food items falling from the sky and crushing buildings. Priorities, people. Priorities.

Thanksgiving dinner/Spawn's birthday supper was excellent. Cake was even excellenter.

Hang on. That's not a word. No clue why, really. I think we should make it one. It's excellenter than a lot of other words.

Yesterday we started potty training. How it went depends on one's definition of success. Like the CEO of a failing internet start-up, I'm going to redefine the meaning of the word 'success' to make all involved parties feel better. Did Spawnling pee in the potty? No. Did he pee once on the living room carpet and once on my duvet instead? Yes. Sure, Geekster and I were freezing last night because we only had a single thin blanket to share, but look on the bright side: Spawnling actually let us take his diaper off without screaming. That's progress, people. And if we could just bottle that progress and sell it, we'd be millionaires!

Or, at the very least, we wouldn't be dreading today's training experiences that will undoubtedly involve a lot more laundry.

I'm not one to rush these things, so obviously we feel he's ready to take the plunge. Gutsy and Intrepid have been eager big brothers, congratulating The Spawn on wearing underwear and on sitting on the potty until the timer goes off. A family of four can potty train a single preschooler, can't they?

Please say they can. Please?

Right now Spawnling is curled up on the couch, bare-bottomed, and refusing to sit on the potty. I'll admit that October in Canada is a frigid time to toilet train a child, but summer was a no-go; he just wasn't ready. Like a Bonsai tree, a preschooler grows slowly over time and should only be sculpted and guided when necessary.

I just compared parenting to an ancient art form. How very zen-like of me.

In other news, Intrepid is a stinky twelve-year-old boy. Why must he need prodding to shower? Why? Does he not understand that greasy hair is not attractive? Does he not get that wearing mustard-stained clothing doesn't help his popularity?

I guess my problem is that, when I was twelve, I liked showers and styling my hair and wearing outfits that match. I very much enjoyed not stinking. Why must boys and girls be so vastly different? There's a chasm that separates the sexes in the teen years. On one side, the girls hold their noses and make other gestures showing how much they disprove of the boys' lack of hygiene. On the other side, the boys take turns whipping deodorant and hair gel across the divide. Two points if you manage to hit one of the girls and four points if she screams and throws it back at you.

One day soon the hormones will hit Intrepid and he will realize he wants to be appealing to the ladies. At that point I will not want him to be appealing to them whatsoever and will likely sabotage any efforts to clean himself up. I have a visual of me pouring gravy in his clean shirt drawer. Yesterday I told him as much and said I didn't want to be a grandmother until at least 45 (that would make him 25, by the way). He said 'Yeah! At least! I'm not stupid, Mom!' That's my boy: full of confidence and mostly void of testosterone just yet. Thank goodness.

If you're a parent, you'll likely recall all those times you said 'I will NEVER do X'. I did a lot of that; in fact, I fancy myself a bit of a former expert in future parenting. Well, I never thought I'd say this, but at sixteen I may just fill his entire stocking with condoms. Santa wants him to be jolly, but safe. Very, very safe.

Gutsy is thankfully a world and several years away from any kind of stinkiness or contraception interventions. He's a hard one to figure out, lately. For those not in the know, we decided to put Gutsy in french immersion this year because, by the end of the summer, he was reading english chapter books at a grade 6 level. As I told the principal, you don't want to see a bored Gutsy: A bored Gutsy is a mischievous Gutsy.

Throwing a child with very little knowledge of a language into a classroom full of it is a lot like dropping a New Yorker into the middle of the rainforest without a map. So how is Gutsy doing? It's hard to say, says his teacher, because Gutsy is so quiet in class.

... I'm sorry. Pardon me? Gutsy is quiet somewhere? I think that might be one of the signs of an impending apocalypse. I'll have to consult the 2009 apocalyptic almanac.

That had me worried, so I started to throw myself into extra homework with Gutsy. You know, being a good mom and all. And guess what? He's absorbing it, retaining and applying it. He reads, he spells, he sings, he writes, and he knows his numbers up to 30. Once he has more confidence he'll start speaking up in class and his teacher will hopefully see that our child is not a mute. In fact, if he's smart, he'll start teaching the class a third language to throw Gutsy off again and regain some serenity.

Good idea, actually. I may just start asking all the kids to speak Cantonese at home.

How long before they figure out I can't speak Cantonese at all? In fact, I'm only trilingual if you count Pig Latin.