Spring is in the Air

Do I write a post with that title every year?

Well it's currently about minus 40, but there is something about the light out there that tells me that true spring is right around the corner. The weight is lifting in all respects: I see a little patch of grass showing through the snow on my lawn and it is green. The light is rich and warm, no longer the harsh blue light of winter. The birds seem happier. And it looks like 1982 at the end of our laneway, as my husband has agreed to discard a number of things from our basement in our first movement towards spring cleaning.

Big plans are, as always, afoot; I was slowed by the baby for a little while but I'm back in fighting form. The only difference is that I am now using my poor husband as my arms and legs where the heavy lifting is concerned.

I have just completed a mini-renovation of my back office. For years it was the zone that everyone had to walk through to get to the bathroom so it received heavy traffic, yet was the one horribly untouched area of our house. We painted one wall and re-did the floors, but left the nasty barnboard siding on the other wall, threw our big ugly desktop computer back there, stacked up a bunch of junk and never really thought about it again. A few years ago I ripped the barnboard off of most of the wall and realized too late that the nails holding it on were 4" long and tore the crap out of the dark-purple drywall underneath. It was a mess. Spider webs covered the ceiling, the baseboards were long gone, there were holes all through the plaster, and we'd for years just stuck thumbtacks all over it indiscriminately.

So over the past month I tore the remaining barnboard off of the arch, patched the holes, painted the ceiling, bought the craziest light fixture off of ebay, painted the wall a lovely deep plum/chocolate colour, bought, painted and installed new baseboards, painted the light fixture pumpkin orange, bought and installed some shelves from Ikea, and bought a bunch of new officey storage containers in bright colours to hide my junk. It looks marvellous if I do say so myself. Makes me want to sit at the desk and play office.

Next up, we are re-doing our basement, switching the bedroom (currently holding my project-type stuff and baby things from other people) and the main room (currently hubby's fishing room). Hubby will install his stuff in the bedroom so the door can be closed to contain the spread of fishing stuff throughout our basement, and the main room will become a kind of rec room where we can do crafts when Nora gets older and hang out when it's too hot outside. As well, it can be used as a spare room when and if people ever visit us again, since there's an adjacent bathroom. We'll see how this goes.

Before all that happens, this week I am converting the space in our kitchen where our wall oven used to be into a proper pantry with six shelves. I can hardly wait. I've bought shelving material, new doors and hardware, but the first step – hopefully completed tomorrow – will be the demolition. I am taking away the cupboards above and below the oven hole and making it a full-height pantry, so we'll see how it goes. Oh I am so excited by the prospect of new storage space you have no idea.

About two weeks ago, Nora and I planted this year's crop of veggie seeds, and now we have a little garden going on in the grow-op – two varieties of tomatoes, hot yellow wax peppers and basil are up. Thai basil didn't happen this year, and I haven't started the squash etc. yet. Before all of this goes into the ground, I am going to till the entire veggie garden – scraggly perennial plants be damned – and add in some compost and peat moss. I do the compost/peat moss thing every couple of years or so and it seems to make zero difference; my soil is still hard clumping clay. I don't know where it all goes.

And then onto the big kahuna of projects. When Nora was born, I laboured under the impression that her crib would stay in our room for the first 6 months, and then she'd move to her room downstairs on the main level. We decorated it and moved the t.v. out and have been hanging out back there all day every day since. However. The reality is, I'd like her to be in our room for a year or so. I still reach over and check her about 4 times a night. After that year is up, I have discovered that I'm just not comfortable having her on a different floor, for a number of reasons: fire, intruders, I can't hear her down there, and it's just too darn far for night terrors, potty training and other after-dark needs. So. We are considering turning our large master bedroom and two large walk-in closets into a smaller master bedroom, small nursery-style bedroom, and powder room, all on the upstairs level. We would have to live with a normal closet (shared! The horror!) along one wall of our room, and we'd lose some circulation and furniture space, but I have been dithering about it for a few weeks and I just don't see another way around it without breaking the bank completely and changing the structure of our house. If we weren't planning on building a cottage next year, we'd probably sell and buy a larger house, but that's not currently in the books as we wouldn't be able to do both financially. Funny thing is, my childhood home is for sale and it would be close to perfect. Its pros include having four bedrooms, two bathrooms, an office, a dining room, a large sunken living room and a separate garage, not to mention the comedic value of buying my childhood home. Its cons include the Vietnamese-run grow-op in the condemned house next door, a crazy woman who I would rather avoid living down the street, and the house possibly being haunted. Hm Hm. I think we're going to just go ahead and live with a smaller bedroom.

Also on the books this spring: mapping out the placement of our cottage and starting to cut down trees, probably fixing up our trailer a little bit, doing a bit of work around the brother-in-law's cottage (planting wildflowers, rescuing his errant dock), pruning the apple trees in front of our house, and getting rid of the old Saturn in our yard. Holy mac we are busy. The advantage is: I am home full-time, so I can manage the gardening and act as project manager for the upstairs reno. People yet-to-be-hired will do the work upstairs. Hubby can do the cottage stuff on the weekends and between fishing trips. Nora is going to learn that her mummy and daddy are active, and there's always some kind of project on the go.

I have one more big project in the wings, but I'm saving that post for another day. Suffice to say, it is a very busy spring for all of us, but now that the grind of winter is over, everything seems doable.

Bad Momma

The other day I was working on some financial stuff when I looked up to find Nora on her stomach victoriously clenching Rosie's disgusting stuffed soccer ball in both hands. This is one of Rosie's most repulsive toys – it's crusted in dog slobber, the stuffing is slowly being ripped out of about three different holes, and it's been dragged outside, downstairs, upstairs and all through all manner of dirt. I suspect Nora may have had it in her mouth two seconds earlier.

Nora's seven months old now, and she's become pretty mobile. She can't crawl forward yet, but she does a kind of rolling/pivoting/backwards crawling hybrid that manages to get her around the room, including underneath furniture and towards the dog and her gross playthings. I realize that I need to keep a much closer eye on her, even if I think there's nothing around she can get into – I can always be foiled by the dog. It was one more incident that made me give myself a sidelong glance and ask "am I a good momma?"

I know that I am good at a bunch of things that make me a good momma: I give Nora a lot of love. I hold her. I respond to her cries at night – not so quickly that she learns to yank my chain, but quickly enough that she doesn't feel alone. I have thereby managed to get her to sleep from 9 p.m. through to 6:30 a.m. or so. I play with her and talk to her constantly. I am happy to let her roll around on the floor by herself but I step in if she's struggling too hard or falls over – I'm never too far away. Hopefully she knows all of this.

But there are a few things that I need to improve upon. They include:

- I let the dog babysit. I know they say "never leave a baby alone with a dog under any circumstances" but this is Rosie we're talking about. Most of the time she lays on the couch sleepily observing Nora at play, and once in a while she'll come close and lie beside her sort of protectively. The most she's ever done is lick Nora on the face. Nora, on the other hand, is intent on harassing the dog – she screams at her, grabs her paws (the other day I walked in and she had the pad of Rosie's paw in her mouth – they were being watched by their father at that particular moment), pulls chunks of her fur, grabbles at her ears, sticks her wee fingers into her gums and nostrils and other atrocities. She genuinely loves Rosie, and I think Rosie knows it, because the most she ever does is move away or give me a pleading look. I wouldn't ever leave the house or even have a shower with Nora under Rosie's supervision, but I am relatively comfortable leaving the room for a few minutes.

- I am too eager to introduce new foods. Last week, poor Nora had an all-over body rash, probably attributable to the peaches I fed her for the first time two days before. However, when I called the public health line, I admittedly was unable to narrow it down to which new food it could be, because in the past three days I'd given her peaches, blueberries, garlic (to jazz up some boring green beans) and a little bit of my oatmeal (laced with a bit of milk) for the first time. I didn't fess up to the garlic or the oatmeal (who's allergic to oatmeal? Ok milk maybe…), and the nurse said it's unlikely to be the blueberries, so I blame the peaches. Really, I blame myself. I am too excited to feed her new things – I need to reign it in a bit until she's at least 8 months or so. And then hoooo baby watch out. Thai food here we come.

-Nora has received a rather varied musical education, including rap, rock, etc. etc. I had great intentions of playing classical music for her, but the house is gloomy during the day while we're here alone, and I feel like we are a couple of girls who need dance parties. She really does prefer Bob Marley and Lady Gaga, I swear.

-Nora knows the theme music for the Ellen DeGeneres Show, and cranes her head around to the television whenever she hears it. I feel horrible about this but after a long day of singing the itsy-bitsy spider and propping her up so she can play with her toys, and feeding her endlessly, by 6 p.m. we need some outside entertainment. Ellen is family-friendly. I try to read her books during the show but all she wants to do is smack them and rip the pages out, so for now anyway, television it is.

-I let her take naps in my arms. Bad practice, I know. For all my bragging about her night-time sleep, I am horrible at regimenting her daytime sleep. She falls asleep in my arms while I'm feeding her and I have a tendency to just leave her there, because as soon as I put her down in a bed she wakes up and stays up. I use the time to read books or send emails, quietly typing with one hand. I recognize that I have to get her to sleep in a bed for her naps, I do, it's just tempting to snuggle her warm little body while she's not squirming and wrenching herself away from me.

- I put her to sleep with a quilt in her bed. I know I know, but it's tucked tightly at the bottom of the crib and she can't get it loose. If she ever squirms down far enough for it to be a problem, she'll encounter the end of the crib before her head is covered, and it's stiff enough that it will form a little cave with a decent opening. Amazingly though, she squirms upwards every night, so that in the mornings I find her way above her quilt, on her stomach, in her sleep-sack. I added the quilt because there's no heat in our room, and she was waking up a bit chilly. I used to swaddle her but that stopped working around 4 ½ months, so now she has a tight quilt and a light sleep-sack. I also used to worry about her sleeping on her stomach but she flips herself over and seems to be good at it, and also seems most restful that way, so I let her be and I just wake up every 20 minutes from 5 a.m. onward to check on her breathing. Ha ha.

There are other things: I never remember to use a bib so most of her shirts are stained with sweet potato or squash, I stick her in her exersaucer for short periods so I can do housework (even though I swore up and down I'd never have an exersaucer in my house), I let her drink my club soda a couple of times because the resulting face she pulled was hilarious, yet she actually seemed to like it, the little weirdo. I still swear quite a lot. We have taught her to stick out her tongue, blow raspberries and shake her head but she to date can't get the hang of waving hello or goodbye. She kind of waves randomly throughout the day. I don't allow her to explore/play with her food, even though some say it helps them learn to eat. Blech. I rarely put mittens on her because she hates them so much – I prefer to just bundle her up with blankets and hope that the hands stay in there. Once, I forgot to buckle up her car seat (I was horrified to tears when I discovered it, trust me). She has been scratched by the cat – once; the cat was justifiably punished and now avoids the baby. The other day I was standing her up against something and in a moment of distraction, her legs buckled and her head hit the floor ever so slightly, and (drumroll) I let her stay up until 9 or 10 p.m. every night, just because she's fun. Oh my god I'm a monster. Please do not call Child Protective Services on me.

All this being said, she's our kid, the product of the two of us, and we are raising her to be part of our family. Truth be told, we are the kinds of people who eat a lot of different things, watch t.v., swear occasionally (especially her father – hi Mr. Gennyland!), stay up late, have dance parties from time to time, think it's funny to blow raspberries, and have a dog that's a complete undisciplined pain in the butt, but sweet and trustworthy. I make it sound like I am negligent and cavalier about these things but in reality, I am not. I am constantly aware that at all times I am likely screwing something up. However, she remains the sun around which I revolve. We have tiny adventures every day and I believe these are good for her – she will hopefully have a great sense of humour, be confident in the knowledge that we are here for her and love her, be comfortable with and kind to animals, appreciate all kinds of music, and have a well-developed palate. Hopefully she will be the type of kid to roll with the punches. And hopefully I will be the kind of momma to roll with the punches too.