I’m now blogging about my life and appliances at www.ispuddle.com.    I will continue to blog about writing and writing-related stuff, like talking about writing for example, right here.   I’ll be back soon, I promise.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already, I totally recommend watching this video of Elizabeth Gilbert at the Ted conference talking about creativity.    So inspiring and fabulous and true on every level.

Click here.

Renovate it.

I rename it, move it somewhere else, and start again.   The thing is that THIS blog is attached to my website, which (if I ever finish the site itself) is ostensibly about the books I’ve written, the books I’m writing and you know, things about writing.   Like how my publicist didn’t send me out to any festivals because he read on my website that I didn’t want to travel to do school visits (a completely different ballgame anyway) in the months after I had my last baby.   And, well, stuff like that.   I’ve wandered off topic, sharing anecdotes about raw bacon and Lego-up-the-nose incidents and I feel like this isn’t the place for that.   So guess what?   I’m starting a new blog that I will forget to regularly update and will feel anxious about not updating where I can talk about things that are nothing to do with writing and books and I’ll save the stuff about writing and books for this website and this blog.   The other blog will be called something else.   Right now I’m going downstairs to sort books and think about what I’m going to call it.   Then I’ll build it, which is really the most fun part of all.   Brown or purple?   Flickr links or not?   I’ll talk about politics and home renovation and, of course, parenting and how it creeps into every single aspect of your life.    My first post is going to be about Sean Avery and his suspension.   Hey, I’m a girl, but I can talk about hockey players, too.  

And here, this site will be for talking about writing.

I can tell you this about writing:   it’s hard when your kids don’t sleep and you don’t have a regular babysitter.    Time just gets vacuumed up into this great monstrous void where you look at the calendar and realize, wait, it’s not October, it’s DECEMBER.   Wha’ happened?   I am excited about what I’m writing right now — SO EXCITED.  I kind of love it more than anything I’ve written for ages.   It’s a book for adults, a mystery with a murder that’s not quite a murder.   It’s a bit about stretching perception and the distance between what you believe to be true and what is actually true.   I think it’s quite funny as well as being tragic and more than a bit strange.  I’m having fun, but it’s a slow process, like a paragraph a week as opposed to my usual style of cranking out a book 100 pages at a time.   But I’m a different person now than when I started writing books for a living.   I’m older, for one.   And I’m just not in as much of a rush.   I’m trying to remember that no one is waiting for my masterpiece, no one’s breath is held and I can take my time and savour the writing instead of forcing it.    I can breathe.

Hope you’re all breathing, too.   Life is short, but not so short that we have to kill ourselves to get everything done RIGHT NOW.  

Right? 

Thank you.

1.  We have been looking at a new house, this one is huge and gorgeous but is in an area we don’t love and the world’s strangest subdivision leaving the house down a long panhandle driveway with no frontage, no front yard at all, and bizarrely hideous seventies creations on all sides.   BUT the house is an early 1900′s farmhouse and is truly unique.   Plus fireplaces in every room.   But… needs a new roof.  We’ve been going back and forth on this.   We love where we live now but our house is small.   It’s a great neighbourhood though.    It’s a tough call.  

2.  If we decide to stay here, I want to reconfigure the downstairs into a better play/craft area for the kids and move my office into the spare room, ridding us of the spare room altogether.   Because let’s face it, the spare room was fast becoming a junk room and no one ever ever stays with us.   This is because I’m bad with guests.   I love you all, but if you stay here you’ll see that I actually have a rotten personality and you’ll wipe me off your Christmas card list and I get few enough cards already.   I can’t afford to lose more.   So having a guest room is pointless.   If you really really HAVE to stay here, we’ll kick one of the kids out of their room for a while.   They prefer to sleep on me anyway. 

None of the above-mentioned projects is an actual book, but I’m working on some of those, too.    I’m buoyed by recent positive reviews in the Globe and Mail and CM Magazine which may just inject enough spirit back into my tired old brain to write something I really really want to write.   If only I had more time.

He will not let you near with tweezers.   Instead, he will scream, “YOU ARE HURTING ME!   YOU ARE HURTING ME!” with the outrage of a completely innocent victim.   You are the bad guy.   Only you aren’t.   He is not   innocent.   He stuck the thing in there in the first place.   You are only trying to help.   You point out that he was the one who picked the gearshift out of his box of Lego and said to himself, “Hey, awesome!  This would fit completely into my nose!”.   He does not care.    You have perpetrated this crime by giving him a nose AND Lego.  “You are a monster!” he screams.  “Stop hurting me!”   You hope the neighbours do not report you to Social Services because you think this would be hard to explain.  

Not to mention you have yet to even get close enough to the gearshift to touch it.   It’s the sight of the tweezers that is hurting him.   You cannot get near his nostril due to all the running and screaming, sobbing and flailing.   Eventually, with a lot of nose blowing and dramatic screams, the gearshift will come out and he will laugh like a maniac and say, “I guess we don’t get to go to the hospital then!”   And you remember, after the fact, that he likes hospitals and will likely do it again just so he can go there and see his doctor, who he loves because she has a tent in her waiting room.  He won’t realize until it’s too late that this tent does not exist in the hospital itself and the ER is more an exercise in sitting in a waiting room for an infinite number of hours watching drunk people fight with their spouses on cell phones (that the signs indicate that they may not use but they don’t care because they’re too wasted to be bothered) while they drip blood from their hand/leg/head onto the floor.  

Then he’ll say, “That was so funny, wasn’t it Mummy?  Was that funny?”

And you will tell him in your firmest Mummy-voice that indeed it was not funny at all.

And he will say, “I thought it was funny, Mummy,”  in such a wounded whisper that you’ll somehow feel badly that you didn’t find it as hilarious as he did, in retrospect.  

So when you are tucking him into bed and he says, “Hey, what’s in my nose?”, maybe you shouldn’t write the question off as a flashback and say, “We took it out already, remember?  Such a silly old thing to do!”   Because then at 3:00 a.m. you will wake up in a cold sweat and realize that “What’s in my nose?” is never actually a question so much as it is the passing of information and if you put the phrase “What’s in my nose?” into babelfish and translated it from toddler to English it would say something like, “Hey, guess what?  I’ve put the Lego gearshift up my nose again!”   When you race upstairs and shine the world’s brightest flashlight up his nose to see and find nothing, you will be perplexed.    You thought you had it figured out.   So you go back to bed, noticing on the dresser the pile of tweezers and other implements used to retrieve the gearshift the first time.   But… but… but…

The gearshift itself?   Is missing.   WHERE IS THE GEARSHIFT?  I don’t know about you, but I’ll be checking noses all day.   Stay tuned. 

Please.   For me.    Update.  

Sometimes our paper boy fails to deliver the newspaper and I’m completely unable to read the news on-line.   I must read the ACTUAL paper.  Which I don’t really read so much as skim for depressing stories which I can then mull about all day, sometimes actually crying if they are really awful and then calling my mum to say, “Why did I read that?  I can’t deal with it.”  If the paper doesn’t come, I read blogs instead while my children play with electrical outlets and experiment with locking each other in the closet.    This is MY time, damn it, and I’m going to use it for me, i.e. fritter it away doing nothing in particular but sipping coffee and staring at my computer, googling things like, “headache with blurred vision dirty contacts brain tumour”.    Because I need Google to tell me whether I’m dying or I just need to refill my prescription for lenses.    I can no longer decide these things for myself because I’m tired.    So tired.   But I digress.   My point is that I need constant regular updates on complete stranger’s lives.    I do!   I’m not actually convinced that anyone really reads my blog so my updates are less regular.   Also typing about my own life is a lot less relaxing than reading about someone else’s.  

What has happened for me since I last updated?   Well, I’ve had the flu.    A big, bad flu which I now suspect is bronchitis, and/or a brain tumour as the screen is so blurry I cannot see what I’ve typed so far.   Drat.   I hope there are no typos.   Also, and much worse than that, my dog died.    She didn’t die passively, we had her put down, and when I say “we”, I mean “my mum” because I couldn’t do it.   I had a dog put down before and it was so awful, I couldn’t even imagine doing it again and besides, Tika was my baby and I straight up couldn’t do it.   Could.   Not.    But it had to be done, she had an osteosarcoma, could no longer move, was in pain, hadn’t eaten in days, and they couldn’t do anything for her.   Mum says it was peaceful and lovely and so I’m going to remember it that way even though I was too much of a coward to go.   Now I’m crying.   I’m a lot of fun these days, as I’m sure you can tell.    Bad flu.   Four day headache.   Dead dog.  

Yesterday, Lola rolled off the bed after her nap.   And not just any bed, but our bed, which is about four feet off the floor, the hard wood floor.    I don’t know what she landed on or how, but when I got to her, she was already crawling vigorously from around the corner with a look on her face that said, “What?  It’s all good.”   As though it’s normal to tumble off the edge of a cliff upon awakening and smash to the floor.    She is an amazingly good natured child, she just is.   Oh well, I fell twice my own height.   Look!   I’m crawling!   I’m happy!   

And I’m lucky.   So lucky she wasn’t hurt and so incredibly lucky that she’s just so damn upbeat about everything.   I hope it sticks as a lifelong personality trait.    We should be so lucky.

What was I doing when she fell off the bed?   I was gardening.   I was right under the window of the room where she was sleeping doing what I do every day while she sleeps, and every single day I hear her wake up and say “DADADADADADA” which is how she always wakes up, and just simultaneously with thinking the thought, “It’s noisy out here today I wonder if I’ll hear Lola when she dadadadas,” I heard the scream.    So.   The guilt.    I’ve been spending tonnes of time in the garden this last little while and it actually looks GOOD.    I have about five square feet of weed left in the border, then I have to weed whack down the side of the house and dig up four patches for vegetables.   Then I’m DONE.   Not done because a garden is never done, but done down to just regular weeding/trimming/maintenance, as opposed to still digging out borders and planting new plants.    I will take pictures and post them when it’s finished but it won’t be today because, well, see:  flu/bronchitis.  

My camera is full of non-uploaded pictures.   There are so many of them now that I’m overwhelmed and have stopped taking more until I have time to upload what I’ve already got.    It gets to the point where there are hundreds and I can’t ever upload without cropping and adjusting, and if there are more than, say, fifty, it’s an hours and hours long job and I can’t fit it in.   I have the garden to do, after all.   And the book to work on.   And, always, the children to entertain, feed, bathe and train.   (We’re still working on the old potty thing, if you’re wondering.)   Now I hear suspicious sounds coming from the hallway which are drawers opening and closing, so I must go and make sure no tiny fingers are involved. 

Apparently the electrical outlets are only interesting for so long, after all.  

I’m pretty sure that God does not want you to ring my doorbell right after I’ve put the baby down for her nap so that I can have my first shower in two days in order for you to proselytize some article containing All New Proof  about the veracity of the great flood.  I don’t need or want to stand in my own front doorway in my robe at nearly noon when I have a swimming lesson to get my son to in less than an hour to convince you that actually the great flood is a pretty low priority for me at this time.  Obviously you mistook my unwashed hair, frazzled expression, and felt-penned hands as a sign that I was in a state of religious turmoil, going downright mad over my confusion regarding the happenings surrounding this mythical flood. In fact, that was not the case. That is just what I look like. And if I was particularly concerned about the great flood (or is it the capital GF- Great Flood?), I’d go out of my way to find my own answers and I probably wouldn’t take your opinion and transcribe it under “fact” in my brain at least partly because I don’t know you from Adam but mostly because I feel quite a bit of animosity towards you for waking up my baby and causing me to miss my SHOWER which is a very important part of my day when you consider how many great floods I clean up daily and how much my skin would likely glow under one of those weird urine lights that they give away free with every bottle of Urine-Off.  (Which is a great product, by the way, but you aren’t supposed to spray it on your skin.   Believe me, I’ve thought of that, too.)    

The Great Flood?   I’ve long ago forgotten even which Great Lake is which, I haven’t slept through the night since 2005, and I really really really honestly don’t mind whether the flood occurred or not.  (Although I must say that I found the resulting movie, Evan Almighty, pretty funny so I know that the flood occurs in verse 6:14 in the Bible).   If you want it to have happened, then fine, it doesn’t bother me one iota that you believe it did (or didn’t) (or some combination:  maybe it was a smallish flood or maybe you buy the part about the water but not so much the pairs of animals setting sail for a three hour tour).   Whether it happened or not will not affect my own religious beliefs (or lack thereof) that I’ve arrived at all on my own without once being influenced by a poorly dressed doorbell ringer aggressively cramming their less-than-fact-based Awake magazine down my throat.    It does, on the other hand, affect me a lot that you WOKE UP THE BABY AND INTERFERED WITH MY SHOWER.  

Are we clear?   OK then.   Go forth and shower.    At least one of us can. 

Love,
Karen

It’s my birthday next week and it isn’t an important birthday or anything, just another number starting with a ’3′, but every year near my birthday I begin to panic about all that hasn’t happened in my career and all that I should have done that I haven’t.   This year, that includes my taxes.   Ha ha.   Oops?   Who wants to open the mail I’ve been accumulating for a year just for this purpose?   Oh, how I hate taxes.   I even have an accountant who does them for me, and I still hate them.   I store my receipts by stuffing them haphazardly onto the top shelf of my armoire, and every time I open the door, handfuls of them fall out and I have to cram them back in again and try not to have a coronary from the load of stress they represent.  But wait!  I was talking about my birthday.    Or was I?   I can’t remember.    Clayton likes to point out that almost every sentence I speak these days contains the phrase, “I forget” or “I forgot” or “Remind me” or “I can’t remember”.

Oh, I was talking about my career, such that it is.   I’ve had such a rash of bad luck lately that I can’t even really begin to type about it.   Suffice to say that so far this year, my salary has been less than the paper boy’s, by a significant margin.   And more often than not, he doesn’t even bring the paper.   I could also not deliver your paper for you and I’d be earning more money than I am right now.    I’m not sure what happened, a series of events that are all making me sit up and say, “Wow, this is not going so well.   Maybe I should pursue a career in haberdashery.”   Mostly because I enjoy saying haberdashery, not because I know the first thing about hat-making.   So here I am, at a crossroads, or what feels like a crossroads, with haberdashery on the left and continuing to write the same sorts of things that I have been writing on the right.    I’m looking up, just to see if anyone is about to drop something heavy, such as a piano on my head.   And I think I’ve decided that instead of following either one of the forks in the road, or being hit by a falling instrument, I’m going to turn back to where I started (Isn’t this a great extended metaphor?  No? It sucks and that’s why I’m having such a hard time selling new material?) and write an adult novel. 

At least, I’m writing it in my head.   When I’ll have time to type it is anyone’s guess.   First I must do the stacks of accumulated laundry, mulch the garden, and get those wretched taxes done before I’m thrown in the clink.   (My mother is sure that this is what happens to those who are late to file and refuses to listen to any argument to the contrary.  Wouldn’t it be a bit counterintuitive to jail people for not paying taxes, thus doubling the carrying costs of the non-taxpayer at the taxpayers expense?  I don’t know, I’m just saying.)   On the other hand, in the clink I hear other people do your laundry for you, presumably they take care of the taxes, and surely I’d have time to write this book that is just now germinating into a full-blow capital-I Idea in my head.   

Anyway, because I never go out, I pulled out all the stops.   I got a dress, called in a favour from my sister for babysitting, scheduled a full hour after playdates and skating and before I had to leave for the elaborate ritual I like to call “having a shower”.   Crazy, I know!   Never let it be said that I don’t know how to have a good time.   I was also hoping to, you know, apply makeup, maybe pluck my eyebrows, and perhaps even do my hair.   Unfortunately, the kids didn’t get the memo.   If they had, they would have seen that it was completely necessary that they be quiet and good between the hours of four and five.    Were they? 

No.

The first step in my prep was to apply a face mask, the peel off kind that gets first shiny and scary tight and then you peel it off slowly and it looks like you’re an alien emerging from a seed pod.   I love those masks.  They are so so creepy but work so so well.   (I have rosacea and for whatever reason, the horrifying reality of slowly ripping off what must be the outer epidermis gives my skin the appearance of being briefly almost not too horrible.)    So I applied the goo with every intention of removing it after ten minutes as the instructions emphasize.    TEN MINUTES MAX.     I read it!   I know!   Ten minutes.   Not a second more.

But then the baby started to cry.  

And cry.

And cry.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that the baby almost never cries.   Furthermore, she didn’t seem specifically upset about anything.   She wasn’t tired, didn’t need changing, wasn’t hungry.    Just… crying.    Finally, I balanced her on the floor near my feet and let her wail.   At least if I could see her, I felt pretty confident that she wasn’t choking on a poisonous leaf that Linden brought her from the garden, or playing with a scary looking house spider, or sucking a disgusting cigarette butt that she had clutched in her hand since we were at the beach three hours before.   She may have been miserable, but I knew she was safe. 

I was about to undertake the face peel when Linden popped his head into the bathroom and said, “Don’t come in here, Mummy.   I mean it.   Don’t come in.”

A sure sign that he was up to NO GOOD.    Going into the kitchen, I took note of the fact that every cupboard and drawer was open, including the Sharp Knife Drawer.   Never in history has he shown any interest in any kitchen cupboard.   Or drawer, for that matter.     Following the trail of water (!), I found him in the living room, whipping the lake of water he’d poured (i.e. scratching the hardwood floor finish off) with the whisk.    “I told you not to come here!” he said, total outrage literally dripping from his every pore.   Oh, no, that wasn’t outrage, it was water.    Water, water everywhere.  

“Sorry Mummy,” he added.  “Sorry!  Sorry!  I said sorry!  SORRY!”

After a brief fracas, I managed to get the now sobbing boy on the naughty chair, cradled the crying girl in my arms, cleaned up the water, and once again faced my shiny, scary face in the mirror.   The mask was by then so tight that all my features appeared to be being pulled towards my nose, making my forehead and chin look smooth and young and the rest of my face look like the visage of a well-varnished apple-person.  Not pretty.   Using my one free hand, I began to pull the mask off.   It hurt.   It was nowhere near as fun and satisfying as I remember it being.    It was pretty much just straight up pain.

A lot of pain.

So I did it really fast, because pain is better (is it?) if you get it over with quickly.    On the plus side, it came off mostly in one piece, which in my world feels like a big accomplishment, like getting all the peel of an orange without breaking it.    If you’ve ever done one of these types of masks, you know you always look at it after you’ve pulled it off.   I have no idea why.   Well, maybe you don’t do it at all.   But I do.   It’s like, “Ew!   Gross!  It looks like skin!”   Except this time, it was more like, “Ew!  Gross!   Holy crap!   Is that my eyebrow?”   And it was.   The top half of my left eyebrow, in case you care.   Stuck to the mask skin, that creepy scary mask skin, which was now in my hand. 

I guess on the plus side, I’d planned to pluck my brows anyway and this allowed me to skip a step.   I don’t necessarily recommend it though, not even as a time-saver.  If it happens to you, I would advise that you fill in the new eyebrowless void with eyebrow pencil, something I personally forgot to do, and so went through the evening looking like the victim of some kind of fraternity hazing gone wrong.

Anyway I hurried through the rest of the getting ready ritual (something I vaguely remember as being “fun” but that was in a previous life when I didn’t have two smaller life forms experimenting with knife throwing in the hallway), threw on my dress without zipping it up because I couldn’t reach, selected shoes, found a purse big enough to accommodate my camera, etc.   And I made it to the dinner only forty five minutes later than I’d planned, which is practically the same as being early, if you’re me. 

The evening was fun, the dinner was OK, the event itself was a great success — and I have four glass trophies in the car to prove it, with Clayton’s name and Flock engraved on them. 

It was only when I got home that I realized that I never HAD got around to zipping up my dress.   Maybe that’s why I don’t get invited out more often?

Lola has been sick, except not, in that she’s sick — technically she has bronchitis, an ear infection, and possibly pneumonia — but she is not behaving as though she is in any way uncomfortable.   It makes the whole situation seem implausible.    She coos and gurgles and laughs and smiles and I swear yesterday she said, “Sorry!”, which would be her first ever word.    It was really clear.   I’m sure she said it.   Linden is my witness.   Anyway, because she’s sick, we’ve dialled back our hysterical day-to-day activities of racing around outside to parks and beaches and playgroups and what-have-you.   Actually, Clayton was away so we weren’t even home, we camped out at my Mum’s house and let her take care of us all.  It was quite nice.   I spent the grocery money on new BPA-free bottles for Lola so we had to stay there so we could eat anyway.   I enjoyed not cooking, not doing laundry, and not tidying up for a whole week.    Lovely.   I totally recommend it.

What was I saying?   I’ve forgotten.

Oh, I know.   So I was at Mum’s and she suggested that I put Linden on the potty and he’d probably poop.   Knowing what I know, I should not have bothered, but things just work at Mum’s in a way they never work here, so I valiantly tried.   He tried.  We all tried.   For two hours.   I offered up anything, bribery, treats, trips to the park.    I cajoled.    I may have threatened.    To no avail, which frustrated me because I’d already decided not to go down that road again, instead to wait until he was “ready” and hope that wasn’t when he was in college.    Here is a snippet of our conversation, for your entertainment:

Mummy:    Just go poopy, honey.
Linden:   I can’t!   I won’t!   No!
Mummy:   Please try, for Mummy.
Linden:   No poopy for Mummy.   I’m afraid I can’t.
Mummy:   Yes, you can!   I know you can!
Linden:   Fraid not.
Mummy:   What if gave you a present?
Linden:   What present?
Mummy:   What would you like?
Linden:   Um.
Mummy:  I’m sure you can think of something.
Linden:   Another Mummy?
Deluded Mummy:   Aw.   Another one JUST LIKE ME?
Linden:   No.
Fishing For Compliments Mummy:  Really?
Linden:   No, a different one.
Depressed Mummy:   A nicer one?
Linden:   A BLACK ONE.
Confused Mummy:   What?
Linden:   I want a black Mummy.   Just a black one.   A black Mummy.
Mummy:  I can’t trade myself in for a black Mummy.
Linden:   I can’t poop.
Mummy:   Time to get off!
Linden:   OK.   (Goes into the playroom and immediately poops in his diaper).

Make of that what you will.   I have no idea where he comes up with these little gems.   Hey, not only do I refer to myself as “Mummy” and “we”, but I’m also now going to regale you with “Isn’t my kid so cute?” stories!   I think it’s official, I’ve gone over to the other side.    Oops.   It happened so fast, I hardly noticed.   Now just wait until I tell you that adorable anecdote about how Linden wants to adopt Simon Cowell as some sort of playful pet we can keep around the house, that’s a good one, too.