I’ve been busier than usual lately, throwing a lot of heart and soul into a fundraising effort to create an outdoor classroom for my kids’ school (thank you so much for the support yesterday – we raised 15% of our goal in less than 24 hours, and due to an internal delay, we haven’t even promoted it within the school yet!  The campaign runs for 40 days, if you want to check back in).

It means things are backed up here.  No less than all of the speaking members in my family asked me if there are any clothes to wear?  (They’ll be directed to a hill (unfolded clean laundry) and a mountain (dirty laundry) downstairs in the laundry area.)  I also haven’t been cooking much, and because we don’t buy much prepared food, not cooking is a problem because it leads to not eating.

So this morning I thought I would make yogurt.  Halfway through the process I decided to jot down notes, in a research mode, to record how it went.  Here they are:

- Look for pot to boil the milk.

-  Reach for the right pot and see blackened inch of food burnt on its base.  Remember that the night before, I tried to make a bean soup for my son’s school lunch and for general eating, but was working on the fundraising campaign and forgot about it until the burnt smell reached me upstairs.

- Try to scrape burnt food out of the pot.  Am unsuccessful.  Attract my four-year old, who tries to help.  Leave him working on pot to check computer upstairs about how to clean pot with vinegar and baking soda.

- Come back downstairs to find husband scolding son because bits of burnt residue was falling out of the pot and on floor.  Advocate (a.k.a. argue with husband)  on behalf of son.

- Put one cup of water plus one cup of vinegar in pot.  Place on stove to boil as instructed by recipe.

- Return to idea of making yogurt.  Look for another pot.  Find all pots in use.

- Decide on next best pot candidate, which is full of the oatmeal I made for breakfast.  Search for re-usable container to store oatmeal, but none in  cupboard or sink.

- Open the dishwasher to look for container.  See that dishwasher was not run the night before.  Notice food debris on door and bottom of dishwasher.  Remember that dishwasher repairman warned us such debris would burn out dishwasher engine again if we didn’t properly scrape.  Regret silently that husband does not properly scrape dishes.  Clear out food debris from dishwasher while baby toddles to cupboard under sink to get dishwashing detergent.  Negotiate with him to put it back.

- Recall that I am trying to make yogurt.  Look for pot, see that it is still full of oatmeal.  Resume search for re-usable container.  Look again in cupboard and sink where there are still no containers.

- Open fridge to find possible container candidate in fridge.  Find one containing miso noodle soup and transfer it to bowl.  Wash container.

- Hear screams from porch where child is playing UNO with his dad.  Provide comfort and guidance.

- Re-enter house, where baby is urgently calling for bowl of miso soup.  Lift him into high chair, and feed him all of the soup.

- Check burnt pot which has been simmering on the stove.  Remove from stove.  Scrape burnt food easily off of bottom, without even adding baking soda as directed by recipe.   Delight in my domestic prowess, and show pot to son.  Look at me!

- Remember that I am trying to make yogurt.

My notes end there.  But when I recall the day, a few facts stand out, like after my husband left for work mid-morning, I was on my own for almost 12 hours with one to three children in tow, plus the baby inexplicably (and painfully) did not take a proper nap.  I fell asleep putting the kids to sleep, and when I woke up, I cleaned up the kitchen and living areas (passably, not well).  The laundry is still in two heaps in the basement, the only difference that the mountain of dirty clothes would be bigger if had I the time or energy to pick up the dirty clothes on the floor.  Combined with my notes from the morning, it does give insight into why it takes so long, no?

Also:  I feel victorious to tell you that at 11:50pm, when all was quiet, I did make the yogurt.  We’ll have it for breakfast.

One huge imperfection is that our groundbreaking kindergarten is in desperate need of some literal groundbreaking.  The outdoor classroom space that we have been given is a concrete jungle.  The teachers have done an amazing job in spite of the concrete, but with a full-day kindergarten program coming to Equinox in less than four months, the barren space is even more inadequate than before.

Knowing this, a group of parents have galvanized themselves into a veritable force of advocacy!  The Equinox Outdoor Kindergarten committee is launching an ambitious fundraising campaign this morning on indiegogo, an international crowdfunding website.  The way it works:  we spread the word about the campaign, and then donors contribute in return for great perks!  Our goal is to raise a small but meaningful portion of the project to get started and to demonstrate to potential funders that we have significant support for the project within our school community and beyond. Then we’ll be able to leverage the money the cover the full cost of the outdoor kindergarten – much better than the best dollar matching program anywhere!

Preparing the campaign has required tremendous effort from so many people and can only be described as a labour of love.  Hundreds and hundreds of volunteer hours have already gone into it (we have an amazing video to tell you about it!), and we are just starting!  The completed outdoor classroom may not be ready in time for many of the committee member’s children to enjoy, and our scriptwriter has no personal connection to kindergarten at all – but we all worked on the campaign anyway.  What we all share is the belief that environmental education needs to be put on the map for the future of all children, and an outdoor kindergarten is a beautiful inroad to that goal.

We finally have a real chance to make it happen, and with full-day kindergarten around the corner, we need to act now!  Please help if you can – the sooner we have the funds, the sooner we can create a true outdoor classroom and promote environmental education for everyone.

Donate now and help us spread the word!  The kindergarteners and I thank you with all our hearts!

When packing for my mom conference in Miami, I opted to leave behind the meaty read that I had just started in favour of something lighter and easy to entertain while sunning on the beach.  Unbridled seemed like the perfect choice: betrayal, divorce, sexual awakening, feminist liberation . . .and it’s just over 200 pages.  Perfect for the lazy days ahead.

Barbara McNally was raised with a strict Baptist upbringing and spent her youth engaged in church activities and living a demure life according to her parents’ religious views.  As a young co-ed she met the man of her mother’s dreams and blinded by other people’s expectations she lost herself in a seemingly perfect marriage.  Many years pass and Barbara is unable to squelch her feelings of restlessness and seeks salvation in the arms of another man.

After her divorce Barbara finds herself truly alone for the first time in her life.  No longer under the rule of her father or husband, she is forced to create a life of her own.   Inspired by the memory of her ebullient, free-spirited, Vaudevillian grandmother, Barbara sets off on a wistful journey of self-discovery where she returns to her ancestral roots in Ireland and later to a hedonistic retreat in Jamaica.  In both countries she opens herself to experiences that profoundly change her idea of self.  Finally she is able to shed the expectations of others, push aside the notion of perfection and embrace life’s lessons in the most poignant situations.

Barbara awakened her passion and is now dedicated to empowering women and encouraging others to forge their own life path and create their own destiny.

McNally’s writing is rich with vivid descriptions making the Irish countryside and sun-soaked Jamaica come alive off the page.   Her writing is at times heart-breakingly honest as she bares herself entirely, exposing her nastiness, fragility and ambiguity at the risk of offending her readers but her transparency is genuine and engaged this reader’s encouragement.  Nonetheless there are moments, albeit few, where I wished the author had not been so cursory in describing seemingly intense events, in particular when she learns her father’s rectitude is nothing but a sham.

Unbridled has a familiar tone and message to Eat, Pray, Love  by Elizabeth Gilbert but Barbara McNally’s journey is filled with less navel-gazing and searching for love than her struggle to connect with and liberate herself.  As someone in a fulfilling relationship who has never been divorced, I was skeptical as to whether Barbara’s memoir would keep my attention but the message of her tome is universal: live life fearlessly, embrace experiences as they come and re-connect with your roots to better understand your present.  Husband or no husband, kids or no kids this is a book about being a woman and nurturing the beauty that lies within.

Our youngest, however, is, in our expert opinion, a genius.  We base this diagnosis entirely on the fact that he can predict, up to six moves ahead, whether he will win or lose a Connect 4 game.  Neither my husband nor I have a particular aptitude for spatial logic, so, when we see it in the youngest of the fruit of our loins, we can only deduce that it’s genius because we did not teach it to him.  The fact that, at the ripe old age of 5, he’s probably played the requisite 10,000 hours of Connect 4 on the computer to pass the Malcolm Gladwell test of expertise, may have something to do with his uncanny powers of prediction, but, because I cannot beat him at a game of Connect 4, I’m sticking with the whole genius thing.

Of course, being able to quickly predict the outcome of a game rather takes the interest out of it, so it wasn’t long before he was looking for the next thing.  His JK teacher (lovely lady, no signs of narcissism) found it in the form of Gobblet, a game of strategy very much like Connect 4, but much more unpredictable.  Now, she did not tell us that he’s a genius, but she did say, “He’s hooked.  He’s very good, but it’s all he wants to do.  It’s a bit of an obsession, actually.”

In other words, he’s a genius, right?  I made a mental note to get a game for the home front so that we could nurture this incredible talent.

So, I was delighted when, quite by coincidence (really), Blue Orange, the makers of Gobblet, sent 4 Mothers a sample game.  Hurrah!  We could have the game of obsession genius at home!

All silliness aside, since it has come into our house two weeks ago, Gobblet has been in use daily.  All three of the boys, aged 5-12, enjoy challenging each other to a game, and it is a remarkably even game for all of them.  It is very much like Connect 4, but complicating the task of lining up four pieces in a row is the fact that the pieces nest inside one another, and you can “gobble” an opponent’s smaller pieces.  One game can take as little time as 30 seconds if you are not paying attention, or it can go on for ages as you manoeuver pieces around the board.  I have loved having it at home, not least because of my fondness for games that encourage kids to think ahead, to think before they act, but because of the boys’ obvious pleasure playing the game.

If you are on the lookout for a new board game for your home, I can recommend this one highly.

This is darkly hilarious: After Happily Ever After, a take on what happens to Disney Princesses after the end.  It ain’t pretty.

And this, this might make you pee your pants.  It might also give you nightmares: Creepy Things My Kid Said.

Last, but not least, check out our new media page, a list of where the 4 Mothers are published and quoted.

Enjoy!  And have a very happy Mother’s Day.

Look, look!  These are my tomato starts!  Aren’t they magnificent?

They’d be a lot more magnificent if it were April 9 instead of May 9.  I got my seeds nice and early this year, and was all excited to plant them nice and early too.  But I was too early, so I needed to wait a couple of weeks.

A couple of weeks arrived, but by then the pace of life had shifted, so it wasn’t quite as easy to plant as I’d hoped.  Also the grow lights downstairs weren’t where they were supposed to be, and I’d have to look for them.

I did have some pressing things to do, but neither of these things would have been obstacles if I’d made the planting a priority.  I just didn’t.  I think it was easier to do the things I’m a bit more confident about than planting.  It’s not natural to me yet – I’ve only been planting, a little here and there, for a couple of years.  I’m still a newbie.  Sometimes I even feel a little suspicious of the seeds.  They require some work to plant, and how do I really know they’re going to grow?

I thought about this a week or so ago when I realized how late I was in starting my seedlings.  Lush, big ones are available everywhere now, and we may well have to buy some this year.  I decided to plant my own anyway, lateness and all:  kale, chard, basil, coriander, and cucumber.  I wanted to practice planting, to get more comfortable, to get my hands, as they say, dirty.

But also I wanted to practice a little humility, and try to do something even when I’m not very good at it or when my efforts aren’t going to be so successful.  It’s something I want to learn to do more now that I have kids.  If I’m going to nudge my boys to try new things, which often feel uncomfortable at first (and I do sometimes so nudge), then I want to be able to do the same myself.  (Within reason.)

I may not get tomatoes until August.  But I am discovering that seeds really do grow.

And, I’ll be honest with you here, one of the reasons that I buy the Sandra Boynton Family Calendar even after switching to a digital family calendar is that you get, not one, but two sheets of stickers to play with.  Dancing rhinos!  Happy chickens!!  Grinning pigs!!!

Having identified this sticker-deprived trauma from my youth, and my continuing tendency to hoard them, I am now ready to identify the root causes of my Post-It addiction.  I could open my own Staples store with the pile of Post-Its I have accumulated.  Am I ready to stop?  To end the Post-It addiction?  The hell I am.  There are spring colours available.

Imagine my delight when Post-it sent us samples from their latest line: Post-it Mobile.  Just when I thought the Post-it world could get no better than spring hues, they go and make them easy to carry around!  We divvied up the loot: Carol swears by the pen/highlighter/flourescent flag combo, Beth-Anne swooned over the Attach and Go Dispenser, and my kids finally showed their genetic material in the love of sticky things department when they fought over the Attach and Go Dispenser with a clip to attach to a backpack.  I’m telling you, blood was nearly spilled.

And I selflessly let them nearly spill it.  I let it go.  There should definitely be some kind of parenting award for that.  Even better than that, when the youngest and I were in the coffee shop for our weekly-pre-library treat, we saw a university student use up her last Post-it flag as she was studying for her finals.  Oh, I thought, I have a cure for that!  Not to brag or anything, but I think I made her day (and very probably improved her exam mark) when I handed over a pristine stack of Post-it Flags.  Her smile lit up the room.

The world is just better with Post-its.

We also discussed very important topics such as classic printed fabrics like Pucci and Pulitzer, taming frizzy hair, the perfect white jeans and miracle face creams.

Add some sun, sand and delicious food, and it can only be described as glorious.  A much need respite from the every day.

However I did learn no matter how far I travel, that I can take the girl out of the mothering but I can’t take the mothering out of the girl.

Here are 5 reasons how I know that I am the Mom in Miami:

1:  I want to ask every other girl if she is aware that she has walked out of the house without her pants.
2:  Instead of coveting the sky-high heels worn by 20-something wanna-be reality starlets, I am tsking them.  Do they know the damage that they are causing to their backs?  Don’t get me started on cramped toe-boxes.  Say hello to bunions in ten years time.
3:  I care less about the alcohol percentage of a drink than I do of the SPF level of my sunscreen.
4:  I much prefer to enjoy my cocktails poolside in the afternoon than at the club where the clocks tick past midnight.  When I am awake at 1 am, I am usually cleaning vomit from bedsheets.
5:  I notice the squishy, doughy thighs of a toddler cruising the beach with her bathing suit tucked up her bum before the rippled, muscle chest of the GQ model jogging on the sand.

image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Asparagus_image.jpg

When I was 17, a friend asked me why I did not speak English with the same accent as my Dad.  Accents had been a fraught issue for me growing up because my mother was from England, and she wanted her children to speak with English accents, but I went to both international British and American schools and would imitate the “local” language when I started at a new school.  I didn’t so much speak English growing up as I spoke many versions of English.  Most of the time, these versions were in succession as we moved from one country to another, but at one point, I spoke American English at school and English English for my mother’s sake at home.  My father’s accent I had never thought twice about: it was North American English, and after 7^th Grade, so was mine.  Permanently.  At home and at school.“I do speak like my father,” I said.

“No you don’t.  He has a French accent.”

What?!?!  As soon as my friend pointed it out, I heard it, but until that moment I had never noticed that my father spoke English with a French accent.  (He’s from Quebec.)

Here’s another example: until I was in my 30s I had never noticed the effect that asparagus has on–well, how to put this delicately?—on the smell of one’s urine.  A friend made an off-hand comment about asparagus pee, and I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about.

“You know.  The funny smell of your pee after you eat asparagus?”

Blank stare.

“Well, maybe it doesn’t have the same effect on you,” she mumbled, and it wasn’t clear if she thought that I was weird or if she thought she had a problem with her pee.

Of course, now, I am hyper-aware of the precise and very distinctive smell of asparagus pee.  How could I never have noticed it?

And now, I am having things I have not noticed about my children pointed out to me by friends.  A friend was imitating my youngest, and she said, in a really animated voice, “Guess what?  And then, guess what??”  He does, in fact, pepper his every utterance with those words, building up the drama every time he speaks, but I had not noticed it until she called attention to it.  And it is cute!

A more optimistic person might take this as an example of a lovely gift to have been given: a new awareness of a new dimension of cute in one’s baby.  But all I can think is, “What the hell else am I missing??”

Has this happened to you?  A sudden realization of something that has been staring you in the face?