New friends.

A 7am flight is early with a baby. We were up at 4.45 and got to the airport at 6am. Luckily I downed a few cups of tea in that short time. I felt like mainlining it.


It was so strange to leave Sonja behind. I've never been away from her for any length of time, but I've had updates from Peter and it sounds like they had a fun day together. With Peter traveling so often lately, I am really happy they will be getting some Daddy-Daughter time.

Waiting to board our flight. Her giraffe was put in a plastic bag to
go through the security check. It was an instant hit.

Getting ready to leave the terminal for take-off. 

The flight went well, although I was reminded just how busy Haven is. I also realized that a sleep-trained baby is less likely to fall asleep on Mommy's lap, since she is no longer accustomed to doing so. The opposite was true with Sonja, who slept quite easily on my lap during our flights to and from Mexico. At least the flight to Calgary was only about an hour, and the other folks on the plane seemed to enjoy seeing her as we walked up and down the aisle. She gave out lots of smiles and was her usual charming self, and crashed out in the car during the forty-five-minute drive to Olds.


It's fantastic to see Kate and Glenn and to finally meet little Landen. Well, she's not all that little; Haven and Landen are almost four-months apart, but you can see by the photos that they are the same size. In fact, I think Landen is a touch taller than Haven already, but Haven wins in the "large cranium" category.

First meeting with Landen.

Cutie-Pie.

I don't know if it's just a girl thing, but babies love other babies. Both Haven and Landen were so stoked to see each other, but they really just wanted to grab each other. And in Haven's case, she was all about trying to grab Landen's face and eyes.  


I don't quite know why Haven always pokes eyes, but Sonja did it too and I've seen lots of other kids do the same. It must be because the eyes are so bright and shiny and they move around a lot. I even see Haven grab and poke at her dolls' eyes. I find myself saying "gentle..." a lot lately.


When she wasn't trying to poke out Landen's eyes, Haven tried head-butting, face pinching and head/face slapping. Example:

Before...

...and after.

They are really very excited by each other and the next couple days should be quite fun. At any rate, I am so happy to have these photos of the first time they met.

First flights.

I'm about to take Haven on her first airplane trip tomorrow. We are flying into Calgary to visit my best friend Kate, who lives in a small town named Olds. Kate and Glenn had their first baby at the end of July, a little girl named Landen. I am so excited. As nice as it would have been to visit sooner, Landen is six-months old now and that is such a fun age. I can't wait to meet her.


Sonja's first airplane experience was when she was around eight-months old. We flew to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico for Kate's wedding in October 2008, where I was her matron of honour. I remember it was at least 34 degrees every day that we were there and Sonja literally wilted in the heat. I was carrying her in a baby carrier and as soon as we took her outside, she would rest her head against my chest, start sweating, and her little eyes would just glaze over. When we would walk into an air-conditioned store or hotel, she would perk back up and come back to life again. Poor Bubber. We had a stroller with us, but gave up on it after our first night in town; the sidewalks weren't the greatest and it was easier to just carry her.


The apartment we stayed in was at the very top of a massive hill. Seriously, the hills were so steep that the sidewalks were stairs. Another reason to abandon the stroller. It was a quaint place and was conveniently located about three blocks from a fantastic vegetarian restaurant that we ended up eating at a couple times a day. I still think about their breakfast and salivate...

First night. Sweltering.

First and only stroller excursion.

After Sonja's first-ever swim in the ocean.

Loungin'.

The outside of the apartment.

Sightseeing.

Staying in to avoid the hottest part of the day.

Planeta Vegetariano. 

Waiting for her black beans.

I hope Haven handles the flights as well as Sonja did. The nice thing about this trip is that the flight to Calgary is a heck of a lot shorter than flying to Mexico, thank goodness.

Small and light.

Do you remember being really little and literally throwing your body around in the name of fun? I do. I remember playing on a playground next-door to my house and taking a running leap before flinging myself down the slide on my belly. I also jumped off moving swings and dove on and off of rapidly spinning merry-go-rounds, amongst other things.  I was small and light and I used it to my advantage.  This morning at Kindergym, I got to see Sonja do the same. 

The Esquimalt recreation centre has an incredible bouncy castle. Inside the castle, along with the endless fun of the bouncy floor, are two ladders. Climb to the top of these ladders and you get the prize of sliding down a steep slide. Sonja needed help getting up the ladder the first time, but after that, she managed to hoist herself up onto that high first rung.  I actually wasn't sure there would be a second time, since she looked pretty terrified during her first slide. But soon she was all smiles and each time she climbed that ladder, she grew bolder and more fearless.

There is just something so cool about watching a little person being so confident; straining to climb and pull herself up a ladder, sliding with glee, bouncing off and running, sprinting to do it all over again.

A couple times when she was running back to bouncy-castle entrance, Sonja took a quick detour to check in on Haven. She wanted to see how her little sister was doing and make sure she had toys to play with. What a kid.

As much as I recall being small and fairly indestructible, I also sadly remember when I grew a bit older and bigger and things started to really hurt. All of a sudden I couldn't shake off a fall from the monkey bars so easily. Hell, I couldn't even hang or dangle from the monkey bars anymore because I'd grown too big and too heavy; my strength-to-weight ratio was no longer working in my favour. A sad day, to be sure. 

Was that the moment I started to leave my childhood behind? If not the moment, then most certainly the canary in the coal mine. Is this also the reason my teenaged friends and I were so drawn to playgrounds after dark? Were we trying to reconnect with our younger, smaller, lighter selves? We never talked about it, but I remember playing on playgrounds quite a few times as an angst-ridden teen. I never said anything at the time, but it always left me feeling a little sad because even though we were all trying so hard to be grown up, here we were acting like little kids again. And most of time, I wished I could just be a little kid again. 

It's just as well I didn't have these insights back then, since I wouldn't have had the delight of spending countless hours brooding and writing cryptic, anguished poetry. And what a shame that would have been...

Pick your poison.

I have mentioned a few times my love of Earl Grey tea. I drink copious amounts of the lovely leaf, but up until this year I never fancied myself a tea drinker. Everyone would always offer me tea and I would almost always turn it down. The only hot drink I've ever really liked was coffee and even then, I would often let it cool right down before drinking it.  But when my stomach started rejecting coffee after Haven was born, I discovered my love of black tea (herbal tea is still not my thing). 


My love affair with caffeinated beverages began in my late twenties. Until then, I never touched the stuff and it's funny because I spent a great deal of my late teens and early twenties working in coffee shops and cafes that served espresso. In fact, my first full-time job after leaving home (I had several part-time jobs while I still lived at home) was as a barista in a coffee shop. Yes, it is odd, even wrong to be served espresso by a person who has never really tasted the stuff. By the time I started up with the bean, my barista days were long behind me.

I went through a few phases with coffee. For the longest time, I drank it black. Straight up. Purist. But slowly, I switched to lattes (for goodness sake, no foam, please) and my drip coffee also became milky, and then soy-milky once I became a vegan.


With tea, I love my soy milk and I even add a little vanilla flavoured soy-milk creamer. Straight up and purist? Well, it's a straight-up blasphemy to my former purist self. Apparently I have become a nancy-pants and I'm okay with that.

I was pouring an extra-milky, pansy-assed-flavoured cup of tea recently and I suddenly remembered kneeling on a chair at our kitchen table when I was around five-years old. It was evening and I think I had just come out of a bath. I was wearing a nightgown. My Mom had a friend over and they were having tea. She poured me about half a cup of very weak Orange Pekoe and filled the rest of the mug with milk. I think the idea was to limit the amount of caffeine, but also cool it down enough so I wouldn't burn myself. I remember stirring a heaping teaspoon of white sugar into the cup and taking a big, long slurp. Heaven. My Mom laughed and said that I should enjoy it, since she didn't want me drinking more than one cup. The sugar alone was enough to get me wired, let alone any caffeine in the tea. I started sipping tiny amounts using the teaspoon, savouring every drop. I watched my Mom and her friend drink their tea, listened to their chatter, revelled in the ritual of it all.


Huh. Like most things, I guess I come by my milky, sweet tea honestly. 

Sonja likes to point out that I drink tea and Peter drinks coffee. "Is that your tea, Mommy?" "And Daddy drinks coffee?" Yes, Baby. I wonder which one, if any, Sonja and Haven will drink when they grow up. For the time being, Sonja only digs hot chocolate. Now she just needs to perfect drinking it at a reasonable speed so we can cut down on the amount of wardrobe changes needed in one afternoon. 

Thank goodness hot chocolate is a once-in-awhile treat. ...Although the photos are fantastic.

Time is a rascal.

This my one-hundreth post on Once Little. One hundred! I didn't quite believe it, but it's true. I started this blog on a whim one night in late October and now here we are.

It's funny how the way you look at the passing of time completely alters your perception of the amount of time that has actually passed. For instance, I can't believe Sonja will be three-years old this month, since it seems like yesterday that she was born. But if I think about her life so far, there were moments that seemed so important and unforgettable when they were happening... and now I have to strain to remember them at all. 

Some things just feel so long ago, like the sleepless, helpless nights of teething and the fear of turning my back while Sonja was in the tub in case she fell over into the water. I'm being reminded of them now that Haven is reaching the same milestones, but when I think of Sonja's experiences, they feel far away. 

The same can be said for my own life. Someone will mention something about the 90's and I'll have to remind myself that the 90's ended over a decade ago. The other day, someone said something about their vehicle being a 1993 and although I knew that was an older car, I had to stop and actually calculate that it was almost twenty years old. Likewise, if someone asks me how old I am, I often find myself answering their question with a question: "I'm thirty ...six?" 

Really? Wasn't I twenty last year?

I actually was twenty in this picture.

Around twenty-one.

Around twenty-two.

See you later, Alligator.

I don't quite remember what grade I was in, but it was likely grade five or six. I was walking to school and I was already rummaging in my brown-paper lunch bag. As I crossed the gravel soccer field, I pulled two pieces of paper out of the bag. I could see that they were both handwritten notes from my Mom. 


My Mom was born on February 2nd, 1943. When she was in school, penmanship was still called penmanship and it was darned important. This is not the case today and as a result, we all have horrible handwriting. I mean penmanship. Not so in the case of my Mom; her penmanship is lovely.


As I read the notes from my lunch bag, I realized one was for my teacher and one was for me. The one for my teacher excused me from class after lunch that day. I started to get excited. The note for me explained that my Mom and I were going to take the bus into Vancouver to go see a movie and have supper. My Mom and I used to go to a lot of matinees, but this was the first time I'd ever been excused from school to go to the movies. 


Now I was really excited and I could tell by the way she wrote the note that she was excited too. And then she made me laugh by writing, "See you later, Alligator! In awhile, Crocodile!" She also included two more lines, but I can't quite remember what they were. It was something like, "In a shake, Mr. Snake! See you there, Little Bear!" It doesn't really matter, it only matters that I've never forgotten how great that note made me feel.


I went to school with lots of kids whose parents would never have taken them out of school for an afternoon movie. I turned out to be a notorious class-skipper in high school, but I don't attribute that to my Mom at all; I would have skipped classes regardless. No, what my Mom did that day only showed me how much she loved me and how much she loved spending time with me. 


Looking back, I wonder if she did these little things because she knew that soon I would be a teenager and I would stop wanting to hang out with her. I also take into account that I was her only daughter and she wanted to do things with me that she wouldn't or couldn't do with my brothers. Things like going to see girly movies (now known as chick flicks), for example.


All I now is that thanks to my Mom, I love going to matinees. And with my help, I hope my kids will too. Happy Birthday, Mom. I love you.

One of my favourite pics of my Mom, when she was around two-years old.

Promises.

Sleep. We gotta have it, we go crazy without it. I put so much emphasis and importance on my girls' sleep. I jump through hoops to ensure they are rested, because it improves the quality of their lives, but also (mostly) because it improves the quality of mine. But apparently, I do not place this same value on my own sleep. Maybe it's because my sleep has been a secondary consideration since Sonja was born almost three years ago. Probably because I learned in the process that focusing on and straining to get as much sleep as possible only drove me to tears. I've developed a lackadaisical mindset about my own sleep; easy come, easy go. 


My mind and my body are not in agreement on the subject.


I've been telling myself for weeks (months) that I will go to bed early tonight. I will put the girls to bed and be in bed within an hour. I promise myself every day when I get up that tonight is the night I will get a decent night's rest. And then the girls are in bed and I suddenly have all this time to myself and the clock is ticking and it's just so delicious having all this free time and oh, I've got at least an hour before it's considered late so I'll just relish this free time and then all or a sudden it's ten minutes to midnight and I've squandered another opportunity. Damn. When morning arrives after being up with Haven once or twice, I'm lucky if I got four consecutive hours and really lucky if I got six total hours of sleep and I start making my promises again.


Tonight is the night.