Ode to February

February is gone for another year. I always feel if we can just get through January and February, if we can keep ourselves happy and optimistic somehow while we feel that we might possibly actually live INSIDE a snowbank, that we can make it to the other side of winter.

People in blogland keep mentioning that Spring is here. I am having serious trouble feeling springlike.

This is what outdoor time has looked like (still looks like) around here.



Shoveling driveways. Shoveling around vehicles.

Shoveling off the roof as well.



Jumping off that roof. Just because we can!

Going to festivities like SnowBlast and sliding parties.

Max too.

Claire, clearly ready to go.

Tonight though, driving home, I noticed something I hadn't seen in quite some time. It was 6:30, and the sun was just starting to set! Maybe Spring will come again. Maybe we're not stuck in a Narnia winter after all.

"Except that after February comes March, the unpredictable jackass of the calendar."

- George Stroumboulopoulos

I. Hate. Suppertime.

The combination of tiredness, in the kids, in us, the amount to fit into a very short few hours, my dislike of cooking in general, the stress cooking gives me, the importance of that nutrition to be dealt with, it does me in.

Tonight was a full out disaster zone.

Troy was hit with a sudden almost migraine headache and had laid down for a bit, which was a little weird in itself. And then I'm not the world's best nurse by any stretch of the imagination. Troy may have done himself a bit of a disservice by being such a great daddy and husband, that I feel like I've lost an arm when he's down for the count.

But this evening I really tried to see if there was anything I could do to help him feel better; water, tried to facilitate quiet. Max was asleep and the other three were playing so nicely in the boys room, putting together a play for the rest of us. Since all was well I decided to take on some 'real' cooking for supper (as opposed to my usual two to three step meals, like fish with a lemon thrown in the oven and cut veggies), and started not just one, but two meals. I had ground turkey sitting in the fridge I had planned on using, so started a shepard's pie to eat this evening, a favorite with the kids, and a turkey veggie chili to freeze.

Just when I was committed, potatoes on, turkey browning in the pan, beans and diced tomatoes simmering in the pot, that's when it all went down.

First Max woke up. He's not feeling well today. A teething, drooly, cranky boy, his face is a rashy mess, and he has the same head cold the rest of us have, eyes and nose both running. He wasn't excited about sitting on the kitchen floor to play while I chopped veggies.

Then the big kids came down, excited to have me come up to watch their play. I might as well have in hindsight. But I declined regretfully, starting to wish I hadn't taken on this project, wishing I didn't have my hands full so their imaginative play I was so happy with could be rewarded with an audience.

Then they started to dig in the fridge and in the cupboards for something to eat. Which I shooed, telling them supper would only be half an hour. That never works.

The boys brought out a game to the table. Max was wailing on my hip by this time, as I tried to spread the now mashed potatoes onto the shepard's pie, I just had to get it in the oven! Claire was on the table, pissing the boys off by hoarding their game pieces. A tired Seth started to cry that Thane wasn't giving him a turn. Thane stomped off mad, leaving Seth and Claire to throw punches. While Max yelled on.

I soon woke up poor Troy, giving him Max to entertain so I could 'just cut up the veggies and get them in the chili'. Oh yeah, can you also break up the brawl at the table?

It was evident Claire, like Seth, was feeling her regular evening unreasonable exhaustion, as she demanded a banana and then promptly threw it on the floor. Only to loudly declare she must have another one.

Thankfully, supper was now served. All would be alright now right? This too shall pass, I chanted in my mind while taking deep breaths.

I sat down to feed Max his long awaited meal, only to watch Claire continue to bawl on her bench for no apparent reason at all (besides the obvious exhaustion), Seth refuse to try a meal he generally will at least try, and Thane declare he's not hungry, his throat hurts. This is his absolute, hands-down favorite meal. Troy is trying to eat and appreciate the meal, but is mostly sitting at the table with his head in hands, obviously in pain from the headache, not to mention all the noise. In the middle of all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, Max can't settle in to nurse (no wonder really), and bites me. Exit Troy stage left, the noise has broken him, he has to go to bed.

Trying to figure out where to start, I put Claire to bed. At least that goes easily, as she collapses gratefully into her bed (apparently her day was a full one, battling a cold doesn`t help). At least now I can hear myself think. And nothing's being thrown.

By her or me.

I give up and give in, Thane and Seth get sandwiches and peppers sent in their direction, where I maybe should have began. Max and I rock and read a few books and point at the pictures, and then with clean jammies on he finally settles in to nurse, reading a little about Egyptians for Seth, a little Harry Potter for Thane.

Now, I sit. Alone. With some fine chili. It's a good thing it tastes good.

I may have never stepped foot in the kitchen again.

So maybe a bit of good will come out of this evening, here's the recipe for the chili we love so much. A recipe handed to us by Troy's mother, who got it from Weight Watchers I believe. I plan to replace the canned ingredients with fresh soon to up the whole food goodness even more, just haven't evolved there yet. If tonight was any indication, I'm not ready anyway.

It's delicious, wholesome and hearty, comforting, and healthy. I call it a mix between turkey vegetable soup and chili.

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Carolyn's Turkey Veggie Chili
1 lb. lean ground turkey
8 stalks of celery
4 lg peppers (any color, I use red, orange or yellow)
3 med. onions diced
2 cans mushrooms diced and rinsed
1 15 oz. can kidney beans rinsed
1 15 oz. can black beans rinsed
2 28 oz. cans diced tomatoes
2 tbs. chili powder

It also says to add one can of tomato soup, salt and pepper, and 1 tbs. vinager, but I generally don't. I also don't use as much onion, and often have this six-bean medley on hand instead of the black beans. Maybe that's why I like this recipe, it's forgiving.

Brown your turkey, put everything in a large roaster, pot, or crock pot. Cook at 350 for two hours, bring to a boil and then simmer on med-low for a couple of hours, or slow cook all day, whatever works for you.

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Funny enough, my copy of Feeding the Whole Family by Cynthia Lair just came in the mail today. As excited as I am to peruse it, it's a bit ironic that it's my book of choice this evening. ;)

One Sunny Monday morning.

This morning I've already been back to the kids school to pick up my sick little kindergarden man. Apparently the sore throat that's been bothering him made him cry when he started coughing in storytime.

So now he's all snuggled in on the couch with his favorite pillow. It has armrests and a back with a handle on the top for carrying it around, and is very soft of course, Seth's main criteria. I had bought it thinking it would be useful for sitting up at night feeding Max, but I never did even try it out. Seth confiscated it the instant I brought it home, named it Sharky (a name I still don't understand), and has been carrying it around ever since. He liked it so much I didn't have the heart to reclaim it. So now he's all snuggled up with 'Sharky', a blankie, Blue's Clues popped in, and a bowl of oranges, reiterating that he's "Prince for a day, right mom?". Right babe.

Before I start to tackle a mountainous laundry folding session, I'm enjoying this coffee. The dining room is sunny, and the birds are loving the birdfeeder Thane made recently at Scouts, newly hung this weekend. I love that Troy hung it on the flagpole in direct view from the kitchen and dining room windows.  

Troy is also finishing his coffee, and prepping to continue destroying the playroom. Yep. It's in shambles.

We actually have enough projects on the go at the moment, with our new family sized entry closet half built and the entry, front living room, and den revamps in full swing (yay!) but realized our assessment date for the EcoEnergy grants is coming right up and that we still had these two exterior walls in the playroom that needed to be insulated. 

So now it is. 

I'm pretty sure I had a picture of this room when it actually looked like a playroom, but can't seem to find it at the moment. Here it is all cleaned out the other day, waiting to be gutted. The kids LOVED the empty space.   

This room is my favorite in the house, the most sunny and warm room, in the oldest part of the house, still sporting it's long narrow old hardwood that I love. It has such a soul. In the mornings when we're here alone, Claire and Max and I will hang out while I have a tea, them playing around me, sometimes with me, Claire serving Max and I her tea. I picture it evolving with us, being a family art space, my 'art studio' some day. Because of the great light in this room I think it would be the perfect space to create in, to draw, paint, sew. I want to eventually paint it Benjamen Moore's Vellum or Dijon, both yellow, a bit mustardy, but keep getting distracted by another yellow called Handmade, just because of the name!

But then... then we got thinking, actually my mom mentioned this idea and we started to chew on it. Wouldn't it be a great spot for a new bathroom?

We have one very small family bathroom, in an odd spot, just before the kitchen, not very close to the bedrooms. Very small, I'm talking 5' by 7'. And very outdated and worn out. It's defintely seen better days. I tacked one of the bathtub walls back up with a nail type of better days. I had said I would not move into this house before that bathroom was renovated, but I said a lot of things back when I had no idea. 

So Mom's idea, a good idea I think, was to take some space from this playroom (our third 'living room' space really) and build a new bathroom instead of renovating the one that we have. At first I balked at the idea, in fear of ruining my favorite space, but the plan kept playing in my brain. A bathroom we could actually move in AND have room to store our towels in? That would be a step in the right direction. It's the closest room to the bedrooms, making the run in a towel from bathroom to closet much less dodgey. And we would still have most of the playroom, with a little thought into the layout I'm sure we could be left with useable, beautiful space.   

Playing around with layout, the couch is our 'tub'. The toy bins and stool, walls!
The kids love the empty space, which is certainly food for thought.

And the extra space added to our kitchen when we take out the first bathroom? Oh, that's the seal on the deal. As one of my friends put it, with the kitchen larger it would be a true Maritime home.

The big bed.

Sometimes in the middle of a particularily busy house, full of drywall dust, plastic hung to block rooms off, furniture moved into the middle of rooms to make way for wallpaper removal or painting progress, it's nice to have one little calm, uncluttered space to land. Since we renovated our room last summer, that's Mommy and Daddy's bed.

Sometimes, it's tea, a book, and a snuggle. Sometimes, it's Max having a full-out belly laugh at Claire's antic of the moment or it's a nice chat with my big boys. Sometimes it's a jumping, bouncy dance party.

Sometimes (especially when Thane, Seth and Daddy are involved) it looks more like a wrestling match, seeing who can get knocked off the bed first, Claire joining in by grabbing onto someone's leg, Max watching the wild things with interest.

Project Plans: Chaise Bench

This pretty little window seat is the perfect size and space for tiny preschool bodies to snuggle up with his or her blankie of choice and enjoy a cat-like bask in the sun. This piece came from Troy's mom, who got it from his sister, who inherited it from a roomate I think? It was on it's way to the garbage anyway when I nabbed it and made Troy fit it into our already jammed van to take back to NB. The things this man goes through in the name of my creative inspiration. I actually like the blue and soft feel of this fabric (the softness factor of fabric reigns supreme in our family scale of like or dislike, especially for Seth and I) and will probably replace it with much the same, it's just stained and a little squished, in need of an uplift. I'm also thinking this will be a much easier starter reupholstery project. As opposed to, say, a sofa.

Project plans: Mrs. Sofa

I'm tired of talking about (ranting about?) health issues for now, as I'm sure you are tired of reading as well, so today we're on to much more fun topics.

Project plans!

As in project want-to's! (As opposed to to-do's or should-do's.)

I constantly have a running list of project plans on the back burner, and generally don't have enough time for everything. So I thought I'd start showing you the plans. Visualizing is key in making it happen!

This week, I thought I'd start by spending the week covering a few furniture pieces I have big plans for.

Starting with the biggest plan.

This old sofa is begging me to reupholster her. I say her, because this couch reminds me of a mom who is dressed so practically, and really wants a makeover to return to her glamourous self. For some reason I think I am up to this task, even though I have never reupholstered anything before, save a few seat covers. I just think that it has such great old bones, I love the woodwork on the front of the arms and the legs, the kids love how the sloped back creates the perfect tunnel between the sofa and a wall. I'm not sure when it got the funny corduroy that really doesn't seem to mesh with it's style, but I remember it being that way ever since I was little, when it was already the couch relegated to the playroom.

I already have this goldish-yellow fabric for it that should compliment the dark wood very nicely. I found on sale several years ago, bought something like 9 yards of in my excitement and lugged it from Nova Scotia to New Brunswick with us in our move. Or was it 19 yards? I had worked it out and it seemed like the right amount at the time. I'm pretty sure you have no idea how bulky and heavy that quantity of fabric is, it's a sizeable package. As you can imagine, Troy loves when I buy project supplies and stash them, because 'I'm going to do that project at some point'! The worst part is that now I keep thinking the fabric she really deserves is a large bold floral print. No?

A little cooperation please

Sooooo.... an update on the eczema trail.

If you're feeling I'm dwelling on a very minor issue, you may be right. I feel, compared to the hardships many people face, that this is a relatively small blip. But, as a physiotherapist once told me in regards to Seth's mild, mild cerebral palsy (comparable to most cerebral palsy conditions in name alone), that to me it is a big deal, because it's happening to my child and that makes it a big deal to me.

We took Max for allergy testing and discovered he's allergic to gluten, among other things. Upon beginning a gluten-free diet (me, not him, as he's still exclusively breastfed), HE SLEPT! And we slept, and life was grand.

Seriously, within two days of me eliminating gluten from my diet he was able to sleep as normal as babies do. He stills eats once or twice a night, but mostly just... sleeps. Without waking up kicking his legs with belly pains and diarrehea, without being awake for hours upset and obviously tired but in pain and unable to sleep, like we had dealt with for most of January. Even better, his rash has become 'manageable'. He has had little flare-ups and his cradle cap is being persistant, but even these are a thousand percent better than it has been. His chin is a bit of a mess, but I'm pretty sure the constant teething drool is the culprit. He has mostly clear skin, most of the time, and the cradle cap and rashes that we're dealing with now are so very much less severe than before.

I'm still frustrated with... our medical system? Our culture? Not being able to cure him? I'm not sure at what exactly to pinpoint my frustration, but this whole process is making me crazy. Medical doctors (the ones revered and pushed as go-to source for our health information), only give me drugs to soothe his symptoms while they poo-poo alternative medicine. Yes. I just said poo-poo. The alternative practioners (who I admittedly tend to trust and appreciate more since I don't see them as salespeople to drug companies), work diligently to help me find the cause of the problem rather than just bandaging the symptoms, but also work hard to scare me off using drugs for his symptoms.  

Can we just have both sides work together to help me take care of my family please!?!

I believe that our body is a complicated, intertwined design, and that the true implications of drug use are not really known. On anyone's body, let alone a very little developing baby body. But, I also believe we are lucky to have medicine and doctors knowledgeable in it available to us when we need it (although 'when we need it' is highly overdiagnosed in our culture). I'm not sure what poor Max would still be fighting without the steriod creams and course of antibiotics it has taken to get his body back to some kind of acceptable state where his immune system can cope and keep up the fight.

I also believe nutrition, and all the minut details that food entails, is the key to our health, and that it's a conversation mostly ignored in the average visit with our doctor. Of course what we put in our bodies affects, may I even say causes, the output our bodies give back. Why, over the course of many doctors visits with multiple doctors over two months, resulting in a hospitalization, antibiotics, and bottle after bottle of steroid creams, did no doctor suggest looking into food allergies? When a homeopathic visit (where we had the allergy testing done) brings it up first and foremost as accepted and obvious knowledge and helps us combat the problem very effectively in as short as two days?

May I repeat, can these two fields please work together? Please stop damning the other and help me help my family? 

I'm just a mom.

I'm just a mom, trying to sift through so much information in areas I've never even thought of before. I'm not a researcher, a biologist, a nutritionist, a medical doctor, or a naturopathic doctor. I know a bit about art. But I can see what's happening with my kids. And I'm a bit of a cerebral chick, attempting to piece together their little clues and all of the information I can get my hands on.

Max and I met with our family doctor this week, just a bit of a follow-up appointment so I feel like I have one common thread in this series of appointments. I do really like her. She patronizes me much less than most doctors, not judging or lecturing when I disagree. She was saying how much better he looks and listening to me list all the avenues we've been down to get here. How the gluten elimination has been key. How we discovered his allergies through computerized electro dermal screening with a homeopathic doctor. How we're now beginning allergy elimination treatments through a form of auricular acupuncture, a very non-invasive treatment done with a similar instrument as was used to test for allergies through acupuncture points in the ear. To which my doctor said "Great! If it works...", conveying quite clearly she thinks it is a hoax.  

Our naturopathic doctors lead us to a Vitamin B cream that works the best for his cradle cap, probiotic drops to boost both of our immune systems, discussing vitamins I should add, areas in which my own body may be low, why my adrenals and immune system may not be up to par that could have caused him to be born in the same state (I digress, but I'm pretty sure the stress of a move, a new job, extensive renovations, three kids and a new baby in a year might have something to do with my body being a bit run-down) and what we can do about it. Information and aid none of the medical doctors produced. Not to mention leading us to the most important discovery, that food allergies are at least the primary trigger of his eczema, and a path to treat allergies. All in a non-invasive, complication free, no risk of negative unknown longterm effects path. I really just don't think alternative medicine is a hoax.

On another note, I'm tired. I'm tired of hyperanalyzing and monitoring Max's skin and patterns. I'm tired of sounding like a crazy, strung out Mom who can't seem to string a conversation together that doesn't involve discussion of allergies, symptoms, and medical series of events. And probably poop. Poop always seems to make it's way into the conversation. I've caught myself daydreaming of Max being three, of that magical birthday where I'll wake up feeling the desire to shower, realizing I have hobbies and projects I enjoy, and a husband who wants to go for a run with me. Where diapers have no part in my day, my little people can all use words and spoons, and can put themselves in their own carseats and most likely even buckle up themselves. I vaguely remember that point happening briefly between Seth and Claire, and I'm holding onto it tightly.