We are fa-mu-ly

You know the song, right? We had a lovely opportunity to visit with my brother and his sons a few weeks ago. They are moving farther away this summer, and I wasn't sure how/when I could get us all down there to hug them before they left, so we were so glad they offered to come to us!

The gang at the park.

We chilled out, island-style. Went to the market, bought popsicles, played ping pong, fell asleep with the kids when we'd meant to stay up afterwards to chat. :) Ah yes, we're siblings, who are both now busy and tired parents. The catching up will have to wait until we have teenagers.

We took Leif's slack-lining kit to the park. It is a lot easier than it looks!

 

Leif and Hannah fought over who got to play with their younger cousin Emiliano.

Whereas Ivy didn't give a hoot about Emiliano so much, she had her buddy in town and wasn't going to miss a minute with him.

 Mmmmmm . . taco party!

We are really looking forward to our mega-family-road trip to go visit them this winter. Until then, it'll be all about Skype and the US postal service.

Love you Bro and my little nephew-Dudes!

xoxo

C

Simple Song

We (meaning Kit & I) are all over this video lately. We've tried explaining the details implied by the unsaid things in the video, the relationship between the parents, between the siblings, between the parents and the siblings, and how it was in childhood and now has played out into adulthood. We don't think they get it, but we know you will. :)

xoxo

C

Down at the farm.

It's funny that when the kids were little I loathed the petting zoo. Really, I loathed any community activity created for families, as I knew it would draw crowds of kids (duh!) and their parents and I am not a fan of kids or crowds. So I never took them to the little local farm. That was the Grandparent's responsibility.

Now that we are all older and more capable, we've been volunteering at the farm once a week since early spring. It is the perfect opportunity to let the kids choose to give back to their community, to volunteer, at something they enjoy, that they chose to do. I've struggled with the reality that our culture lacks many opportunities for kids to give back in a real way, not just with money, and part of this is that we've become so libelous, many places will no longer accept children as volunteers, even with parental accompaniment. So the petting zoo is one of our last bastions for kids to lend a hand and really feel like they're DOING something, really helping out.

Our jobs vary each week, but there are some basic tasks we expect to do at every visit.

We need to cajole the pony and donkeys, to get them back in their corral before the public arrives. Those guys know kids are not to be obeyed.

Finally, success!!

We need to change all the water buckets for the goats, after we help run the stampede of goats down to the petting area.

There are a lot of water buckets!

There are peacocks all over the farm, screeching their high-pitched calls and fluffing out their feathers. Yes, it IS beautiful, a spectacle of nature, but these guys do nothing but THIS all morning long, and honestly, they kind of get in our way. They're not quick to move because they want to be sure we've seen all their glory. They give you the eye, saying "Do you SEE this, how glorious we are? Are you stunned at our beauty?"  They don't get it that we're not peahens, we're hu-mans.

And frankly, the peahens don't care about the cocks feather-show either.

There's always poop to scoop. (The other side of Ivy's bucket says "Zoo Poo Patrol". She feels very responsible with this task).

Our reward at the end of our shift, when the daycare and school groups leave, is having the baby goats all to ourselves. They climb on us and chew our sleeves. We just sit there and let them fight over our laps, the little cuties.

I try to give my love to those tired mama goats. They like a good chin-scratch session.


On our way out we fawn over the baby pigs.

 It's a pretty good way to spend the day. :)

xoxo

C

If it's not one thing . . .

 . . . it's your mother.

This phrase has made me grin since I first heard it years ago. It brings together our cultures' collective pastime of analysing our behaviour and childhoods, and how our adult relationships with our parents (it's not just mothers!) can be a minefield of subtle slights, sighs and feeling like, no matter what your life is like as an adult, one minute with your parents, and you're right back to being the child again, and all the feelings that can bring. And our culture seems to focus on the negative. Was it the missed sports events, was it not having what other kids had, was it being made to eat food you hated, was it report cards that weren't up to their expectations? For many, it is far more serious issues, where the role of parent was only as important as how little you could give to it, and for those children, we all feel a great sadness. There are many adults who have come out of awful childhood situations, and those that I have met have moved on however they can, and focus on the future, having laid their pasts to rest in some way. But our culture as a whole is so often about 'our parents' and how they have affected us negatively. The jokes about therapy, the mother-in-law characters in films, the recurring seasonal movies about adult children coming home for Christmas only to descend into squabbles with their mothers and fathers amidst a symphony of other relatives and siblings. These momemts in film are so funny, because they touch us, they are familiar to us. Family is where we come from, so often, and it does shape who we are. And so we joke about it, and commiserate about it, and vow, as parents ourselves, to not be like our parents, even though we know we are, in that moment and many others, being so exactly like them it's uncanny. My mother always tells of how she'd go to bed at night vowing that tomorrow she would not yell. That tomorrow she'd enjoy the moments with us, and be patient, and have things organised, and not worry about the cleaning or the mess we were making, and soak up our childhoods as the precious, fleeting moments in time that they were. And then tomorrow, when it came, she'd be yelling before we made it out the door to school. She'd tell me this in response to my own feelings of inadequacy as a parent, of messing up my kids, yelling too much, not enjoying the moments and ignoring the trivial things. We are so much like our parents, even as we vow to somehow do things differently, to find that magic solution that so eluded their generation. Yet somehow, instead of finding connection in these similarities, in finding support from each other, we turn to focusing on our differences, in those achilles heels of our relationships with our parents that make us groan and sigh when they offer advice, or guidance. We've made childhood angst into a topic of entertainment and shared greif.

In other non-Western cultures it seems to be unquestioned that you respect and appreciate your parents, no matter what they do. You know how hard they work for you, how much they sacrifice, how much they love you. It is simply an accepted fact. And so you act accordingly.

I wonder if those adults have a different experience of dealing with losing their parents. Are there things left unsaid, worries that they never enjoyed their parents while they had them around? For that is the flip-side of my culture's angst about our parents: we sigh and complain about them while they are here, and then regret not enjoying them as much as we could have, when they are gone.

My dear friend lost one of her parents last summer, his death unexpected, arriving in the night, leaving his children in shock and full of greif. And as I watch her and her sibling and their children deal with this, with the feeling of wishing they'd had more time, of things they'd have said if they'd known this was coming, I keep coming back to our perspective that our families are permanent. That that is why we can afford to analyse them, and criticise them, and be driven crazy by them. Because we believe, as we did as children, that they will be with us forever, that when we finally find the time to appreciate them, to enjoy their company, they'll still be here for us. Just as sibling rivalry is an accepted part of our perspective on families, so is our frustration at our father's stubborness or our irritation at our mother's nagging. Of course we never treat our friends how we treat our families. But perhaps we should treat our families how we treat our friends, because they are our people, our kin. They are where we come from, and shape who we are, for better or worse.

When my friends and I get into talking about how our mother's drove us nuts that week, or how our fathers just didn't get it, a friend of mine is silent. She lost both of her parents years ago. And she is full of stories of how much she appreciates them now, how she wished she'd gotten it earlier on, when they were still here. And as parents ourselves now, we would of course want our children to love us and appreciate us now, not after we're gone. My parents are so saddened by the loss of my grandparents, both of them wishing they could've talked to them more before they'd died. No one wants that sort of grief for their own children. But maybe our culture perpetuates it by laughing at our families instead of cherishing them. And maybe in some ways we need that, as a release, a bit, of the frustrations we have with those relationsahips we have with our parents and siblings, relationships we were born or adopted into, and now must maintain forever. My mother and I laughed and cried through Steel Magnolias in the 80's, because it showed how our family ties are both funny and impermanent, reminding us to live in the moment. Maybe we are afraid to acknowledge that we will lose each other, that as time marches on, we will have to say goodbye to our siblings and parents, to those people we have known longer than anyone else. So we should keep the laughter; laughter is so good. But maybe we should also have more love, more talking. Some kind words amidst the jokes and angst. Let our parents know, while we can, that we love them, and appreciate them. Set an example for our children, and hopefully help them not feel as burdened with greif when we leave them.

xoxo
C

The Ballad of Bitter Honey

That's the title of my favorite Clem Snide album. It's also the perfect title for this story.

I've been meaning to post for weeks about my honeybees. They bring me such joy. Every morning I can look out the kitchen window at my hive and see them already busy at work, darting out to find nectar. It literally brings a smile to my face every time I see them. So it brings me such sadness to discover I have to get rid of them. First, the back story.

Bee hives function just like any other species. Their goal is reproductive success. As more and more bees grow and hatch and the hive gets crowded, the bees will decide it's time to break off from the group so they grab their queen and fly off to find another new hive spot. This is called a swarm. Beekeepers don't want this because it means they lose their beloved bees. To prevent swarming you must ensure your bees have enough room, and watch them often for signs of swarming. The sign you're watching for is the building of a queen cell. When bees plan to swarm they try to grow a new queen to take with them, as every hive needs a queen. Queen cells (where they grow) look very different from regular bee cells. See it hanging off the honey frame below?

Some of my keener bees built double-queen cells.

 All in all I found 17 queen cells growing in my one hive. Many beekeepers would just kill those queens, as it's far too many and a swarm is surely imminent. But this softie couldn't do that, so the other option is to form new hives before the bees get a chance to do it themselves. These are called nucs, little starter hives. You take some frames with a queen cell or two on them, some of the bees and you build little shoebox sized hives to put them in. The bees feel like they've now swarmed as they are in a new space that is less crowded. I built 4 nucs and divided my queen cells up among them.

The next step is to check them often to see if a queen has hatched. Once she does she'll sting the remaining unhatched queen cells so they never hatch. It is survival of the fittest in there for sure! It is hard to see the queen in this shot but I have faith in you. She is dead centre at the bottom of the frame, to the right of those big empty holes in the beeswax. All the nearby bees are facing her, surrounding her. She is slightly bigger and longer than the other bees, and her back has no stripes on it, but is instead a warm chestnut brown colour. Do you see her?

Those sealed golden places above her house growing baby bees. When they are ready to hatch they'll chew their way out of their little spot. For 20 days they'll live inside the hive as nurse bees, tending the other baby bees that have yet to hatch, and then they'll spend 20 more days as forager bees, flying up to 3KM to find delicious nectar in the flowering trees and bushes in my neighbourhood. Then they die. Our yard is littered regularly with deceased little bees. Such hardworking gals indeed. And yes, they are ALL females. Much to my dismay Hollywood's ability to spread false information is still very successful, so not only do folks believe the hardest working bees are of course men, they also believe bees have only 4 legs. Sigh. Hollywood just keeps messing kids up, huh?

Anyway, my hive was doing great, my nucs were doing great, I was so excited to expand my little honeybee family. I'd have 5 hives by the end of summer, all buzzing happily in the garden.

Then I was stung a few weeks ago. I have been stung before, and while it is definitely painful, I didn't think it was a big deal. I was stung last year and my cheek swelled like I'd been to the dentist. No big deal, right? Then I was stung in April of this year and my leg swelled up so much I couldn't fit into my jeans. Wow, that's kinda crazy huh? It itched and hurt, but all stings do right? So I ignored it as best as I could. When I was stung on my hand a few weeks ago it swelled. A lot. And it spread up my arm to my elbow. It itched like MAD constantly, and only stopped hurting if I held my arm up over my head. This lasted for 5 days! Is this normal?

Nope, turns out it's not. Normal is what happens to Kit when he got stung last month. Nothing happened. It hurt, he itched it once, and life went on. My friend, who is a nurse, confirmed that my reaction is definitely not normal, and since it's getting worse each time, it's dangerous. My neck or scalp cannot afford to swell that much! Keeping my bees any longer just increases my chances of getting stung again.

So I've put my lovely bees up for sale, and a beekeeper from the Gulf Islands is coming next week to take them all away. I'll miss seeing them in the sunlight every morning, and the yard will be so quiet without the quiet hum of their busy work. I really loved the gift of having bees in my life, but I have  to accept my new reality. Bummer huh?

xoxo
C

I have 15 hours a day to work with . . .

 . . . why can't I get anything done?! Here is my answer. I have watched this 5 times.

The last stitch.

This is one youtube I love to watch. It's about knitting, but also about life and our endless quest for more, of never being able to just stop and be in this moment. Love it.

xoxo

C

This morning I got up early, before the rest of the house, as usual. Fed Mr. Bruce, made my tea, started the laundry, made salad and baked cookies. We will be out most of today so I need to have enough snax and lunch ready to take with us. I fed the birds, took my vitamins. As each child woke up I hugged them and confirmed their morning toast order. I checked my email on my way through the livingroom. Then as I stood buttering their toast I tried to process the news I had just read.

A childhood friend's mother has just died, my email told me. And I recalled lunches in their kitchen, sleepovers at their neat house in the woods, her mother's voice as she lamented my friend for not doing her chores or laughing at my friend's jokes. I can see her husband, such a great dad, and how they were always together, partners, in life, in businesss and in caring for each other and their daughters. They were one of my 'dream' families, you know, the ones you wish you belonged to when your own was driving you nuts. And now she is gone. My heart aches for my friend, whom I haven't chatted with in 15 years. For her sister, her sweet daughters, and for her father, who has lost his partner, his best friend. It's just hard, all around.

And I stood their buttering, thinking of how stressed out I can get trying to show my loved ones that I care, to honour my friends, to try to do what I can for those in my big, gregarious family of people. And how much I stress about living my life 'right'. That I want to arrive at my final days feeling that I spent my life well, I did what I hoped and did not waste a minute. When will I have that career I dreamed of, when will I travel like I planned to in high school, when will I get all those books read? Yet each day I am taken over by the minutae, the details of what, when, how now. And that focus is lost. You get lost in your life, no matter how much you try to remember the big picture. But maybe that is not such a bad thing. To live constantly trying to shift your focus, trying to be sure you remember what really matters, is hard. It can really stress a gal out. And maybe being lost in your life is the same thing. Instead of focusing on the bigger picture, the big to do list, the forever-looking-ahead-to-be-sure-you've-got-it-all-lined-up-so-when-you-look-back-it's-a-life-well-spent thing can make you miss it, your life. Can make you forget what is going on now, how much you love it, or not, but that this is it, the life you've got. It could all be over tomorrow, or in 30 years. Maybe living in these days, getting lost in the tiny details and distracted by the toast crumbs is okay. It's being present, now, when that life you keep worrying about is happening right in front of you.


It's something worth remembering.






xoxo

C

On the water . .

When you are on the ferry, life is good. The islands float by, maybe the sun is shining down on you out on the deck, or maybe the day is cloudy and grey and you watch it go by from inside the boat. Either way, it is a reminder of the awesomeness of where we live. I imagine people living in the various geographies of Canada have their own similar connections to the landscape that is the backdrop to their lives. I have ridden the ferry for as long as I can remember. As a child, on holiday with my parents, then after their divorce, traveling to Al's cabin more weekends than I could ever count. As an adult I attended many a midwifery meeting in Victoria, and Kit and I camped and road tripped around the Coast. We lived in Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast, and years later made a final move to Victoria. The ferry has been such a constant in my life, and I am always restored when I can make that connection to my unique landscape.

Today, I soaked up some sun.

Yes, life is good.

xoxo

C

So far . . .

It has been months since my last post and a lot has happened. Some big birthdays happened around here which must be mentioned first.
A very lovely little person turned FIVE this winter! And now she'd like to be let in on all the action thank-you very much.

And then not much later an amazing fellow strutted through his ELEVENTH birthday! Holy cow! Do you all remember when he was only ONE??

In case you're wondering, both these great days were celebrated in Hawaii, in the lovely warm, humid sunny weather we love. It was great, each day debating pool or beach, and we generally opted for both.

We checked out the familar sights (the zoo, the reefs) and added in the Foster's Historical Garden in Waikiki. We saw crazy plants and gorgeous flowers. But we were not prepared for this:

What a crazy-looking tree! Pods growing off the sides!

We have since learned that lots of tropical, pod-bearing trees grow just like this. Cocoa trees are a prime example.


We were blessed to have friends and family make the island trek to come and visit us over the winter. It is so much fun to have the house filled with good buddies. The kids are forever busy and us adults just sit back and let the mayhem reign

And on all those rainy West Coast winter days, we kept ourselves busy. If you have these supplies (duct tape, empty beer cans, empty milk cartons and some odd-shaped containers, we used tofu and BIO-K) you can make the coolest thing.

A Star Wars AT-AT walker planter. How awesome is that?!!

The plants look a little rough in that pic, but it's been sitting on the counter in a bright window for months now, being spritzed daily by its attentive creator (Hannah) and now it is a flourishing forest that currently houses a fierce battle between Darth Vader and a tough little Ewok.


Speaking of battles, another sort of battle is waged regularily in our basement, and it looks something like this:

Those Nerf guns are definitly the best family gift ever!

Leif and Hannah have created many treasure hunts and quests for Ivy this winter. They are full of intrigue and challenges, like this one. She is so lucky to have such great siblings I tell ya'.

"WHOEVER DRAWS THE SWORD CAN DEFEAT THE MONSTER" it reads.


We checked out a new burger place that opened in town, Big Wheel Burger. I know, you'd never expect us to say that, we are not burger people. The kids asked us if this was what McDonald's was like. Oh no little grasshoppers, this is nothing like that. Big Wheel is a joint collaboration between a bunch of local chefs who wanted to create the old-fashioned burger place of yesteryear, using local, organic ingredients. So they have fries and burgers hand made from local, organic beef and spuds, buns from an island bakery and gluten-free buns from the awesome Origins bakery just up the street from us. Milk shakes from Island Farms milk and ice cream and local beer from Phillips rounded out the great all-local menu. It was very tasty, we ordered far too much, and will keep it in mind if we're at the beach this summer and have that childhood burgers-at-the-beach feeling.

And now it is spring, and we have proof that the weather is warming up. The bees are out! Wahoo!

xoxo

Caelen

The First Day

The weather reports in the fall of 2011 said we'd have one of the biggest snowfalls ever this winter. Man, were we excited. With all the talk of El Ninja, and record-breaking snow, we busied ourselves for weeks gathering boots and gloves and coats and snowpants. We bought magic carpets and goggles. Everything we'd need for a winter of sledding and snowball fights. We were psyched.

After the weeks of rain that blanketed the island for Christmas and New Years, it was so great to get outside on the first day of 2012 and get a touch of sun. We scampered around the rocks and found the perfect driftwood walking sticks. We peered into tide pools and gazed across the ocean at the snow-capped mountains of the Olympic Peninsula.

Even though we did not get a single flake of snow, this winter is reminding us of the beauty of where we live. Yes, it's raining again today, and has been since that first day of the year. And it may well rain right through until February. But we live on an island in the ocean. How cool is that? It is a breath-taking place to spend each day, inhaling the clean air, having beautiful views and beaches on all sides. So it doesn't get very cold, certainly not cold enough to snow. Many would think that is a blessing.

Rain is just as good a reason to light a fire every day.

Happy New Year,

xoxo
C