M stole a baby. Let's all remember that M is not quite 3 years old. Still a baby himself in my eyes. M doesn't believe he stole a baby, in his eyes, he was saving baby. Baby was snatched or I should say rescued from a closet where she was living in a box that was filled with Legos. Baby also lives with one of my cleaning clients who kept toys in one closet for when nieces and nephews came to visit. My cleaning client's nieces and nephews are now grown and no longer play with the toys in the closet. So, I like to think that M thought he was doing Baby a favour by saving her from a lifetime of sitting in a dark closet in a box with sharp cornered Lego poking at her rubber limbs. It's not that M snatched her maliciously, he didn't stuff her under his shirt and tip toe out the door. It happened all very innocently, "Baby come home with me." Baby came home with us.
Baby was only supposed to stay with us for two weeks, and then go back to my client's house, but she has managed to extend her stay to 3 months. Now, it's like we are fostering her, which I don't mind, she requires no maintenance at all. She doesn't even wear clothes, except for a bib. M thought she needed to wear it, but he uses the bib to drag Baby around.
If you have ever seen the movie Toy Story 3, M's baby looks like the Toy Story baby, but less creepy. Baby has rubber limbs and a rubber head and her skin has a lovely olive colouring to it, I like to think she comes from Italian heritage. Her body is an off white cloth, stuffed with what feels like rice, I'm pretty sure it's not rice, but it makes her squishy but still firm. Oh, her hair, is a shade of brown, moulded onto her head, she never has bed head, because her hair and head are all one piece. Her eyes are her best feature, electric navy blue, with long lashes that flutter when you lay her down or pick her up. Her lips, a perfect pout.
Baby has been places since she has come into our lives. We call her a "she", M informed us that Baby was a girl and that he was the daddy. Baby has been grocery shopping, she's been to the bank, but mostly, she just travels around with M and waits for our return in the van. She hangs out at home with M, she enjoys watching kid shows with him, and at night she has the prime spot in bed, right beside M, only the favourites get the coveted spot, and only M seems to the rotation schedule of his thirty stuffies that congregate in his bed. I like to feel that we have enriched Baby's life since she's left the closet. I know she has enriched ours these past few months, in around about way
A few years ago, a movie came out, that I just recently watched. It was called, "Lars and the Real Girl." Ryan Gosling played socially awkward Lars who ordered a mannequin to fulfil a void in his life. Lars took his pretend lady, "Bianca" everywhere. He had her dressed nicely, gave her an occupation, and treated Bianca as a "real" lady. At first the townsfolk where taken aback with Lars and Bianca, but soon learned that Lars needed Bianca, and the townsfolk embraced Bianca with open arms. The townspeople embraced her so much that Bianca was booked solid with people of the town keeping her busy with bowling and visiting shut ins. To make a long story short, Lars gave Bianca a sickness and she passed away, with the townspeople giving her a real funeral and letting Lars know how much Bianca had enriched their lives and how they had been taught by her.
Sometimes I feel this way with Baby the same way Lars felt with Bianca. We treat Baby like she's real. D doesn't have the maternal instinct that M does. M usually has Baby wrapped in a blanket, usually because she's been crying and needs her mommy. The mommy is me. Yes, I carry Baby. Only for a minute, I let M know that Baby is quiet, so I sit her down. D doesn't treat Baby like a football. He isn't punting her around like he does with other stuffies. D and M seem to have a mutual understanding that D is to keep his mitts off of Baby. In fact D tries to help M out with Baby, by picking her up, usually by a foot, and dropping her on the couch. Last night, Baby came out to D's swimming lesson. The dad about the house had Baby wait in the vehicle while we were all in the pool area. I really don't know what the dad about the house was thinking, leaving her in a cold van like that, and when I voiced this concern, he reminded meand rolled his eyes at me, that she had a blanket. "Rather she freeze in the van, than lose her at the pool."
Today, Baby hurt her head. M told me so. I asked him if she needed a band aid and M responded with a "No." Doctor D was on duty. And then the things that happen when I leave the room. When I came back into the kitchen, Baby was lying with her back down on the kitchen table. M was sitting on the kitchen table, hammer in hand. Doctor D, was sitting on a kitchen chair with a screw driver...square head. I can only assume that an operation was taking place. I guess I saved Baby's life when everyone needed to head out the door to begin the day.
I'm not quite sure what will happen to Baby. Maybe her fate will be that of Bianca's, M will have her grow sick and then just pass away. Or maybe I'll just take her home, to her rightful home, back to the closet with the box of Lego.
From the 4th line,
Arlene
Wednesday 27 November 2013
Friday 15 November 2013
Cursive or cursed writing?
I have a love/hate relationship with a pen. Not so much with a pencil, pencils come with erasers on top, so you can quickly do away with an error with a few vigorous rubs on your paper, try to keep your paper intact, rubbing to hard does produces holes in ones foolscap. Pens are different story, you can't erase pens. I know in this day and age you can go out and buy fancy shamcy erasable pens but from what I've seen, you can still see the error. And I don't like the ink in those pens, it's weird ink, doesn't flow as nice it gets kinda gloppy and smeary when you accidentally glide your hand through it.. I know there's white out you can buy to "paint" over your mistake, put everyone knows the mistake is there because white out isn't the same white as your piece of paper. And then there's the white out tape, which just bugs me, or maybe I don't work it right, but I usually end up covering too little of the mistake or covering too much of the mistake and end up with letters just sort of hanging about in a sentence. When I find a great pen, and what I mean when I say a "great pen", I like the way it feels in my hand, a fine point, not to thin, not too thick, the ink runs nicely, doesn't glomp out leaving gobs of ink on your paper, doesn't leak and leave ink all over hands, and then you take so much time trying to figure where this ink is leaking from and by that point your piece of paper is a mess so you crumple it up and look for a pencil. When I find that great pen, and when I want to use that great pen, chances are, highly likely, that someone with the initial "C" who lives in my house, has taken that pen to school because she can't find her big box pens that she bought at the beginning of the school year in her messy room and so she leaves me with the crappy pens that won't produce ink or skip ink along the paper.
All that being said........It's Go Time!!!
I learned how to cursvise write in Grade 4. with pencil, with an eraser on top. The day that we learned how to write a capital letter"I" in handwriting was the day that I was absent from school. I can remember where I was too, at the eye doctor, getting fitted for my over sized, pastel coloured, googly, upside down armed glasses to help me see the chalkboard better. I missed the whole lesson on how to write a proper capital letter "I" so when I returned school a short while later, everyone in my class was happily writing capital letter "I" the proper way.
The school that I attended was a little rinky dink country school that put penmanship in high regard. If you had great penmanship, you were going places. With this all being said, I figured out on my own how to write a capital letter "I". I did ask the teacher for help, and she did show me but I wasn't too keen on her way. I liked my way better. Her way was to start with the big loop and swoop over to the tail. I showed her my way. My way was to start with the tail, and end with the loop. Backwards. That's when my teacher asked me to write out a sentence for her. That's when I ended up with a "corrective red rubber triangle shaped put on my pencil" thingy mabobber. Apparently I held my pencil wrong, and this corrective device was going to guide me along the path of perfect penmanship.
WRONG!!!!
Let's fast track through a few years. My rinky dink school was big on doling out "lines" as punishment. I have done my fair share of lines. "I will not forget my homework" was one. "I shall not talk" was another. "I shall not talk back" was another goodie. Those were the main ones I received and please write out one hundred times! As you got up in grades, writing dictionary pages and long passages out of the bible were favourite punishments for teachers.
I like to think that this is why my penmanship suffered. I just wanted to write my lines out quick and get them over and done with. I didn't care what my lines looked like, I wrote them out on the bus on my home. I wrote them in bed, late at night with a flashlight clamped between my teeth so my parents wouldn't find out that I had lines.....AGAIN!! I wrote them on the way to school on the bus with friends helping so my teacher wouldn't dole out a hundred more because I had forgot to do them. I got good at doing lines. I still forgot my homework, I still talked, and I still talked back. Can you tell? Those lines did me a lot of good.
Then one day, a whole bunch of us got lines. Usually, there was a small select group that received lines and I was in that select group. But this time, people who never got lines, got lines. One girl, in my class, who never got lines, got lines too. When she handed in her lines, with all us regular "writers of lines, my teacher held her piece of paper with one hundred perfectly written penmanship lines up the wazoooo, and went on and on how he had never seen a punishment written out so beautifully. He went so far as to pass it around the class for all of us to see, I believe it was even thumb tacked to the bulletin board as a lesson for us regular line writers. Clearly this girl had not written her lines on the bus.
Penmanship was making me angry. The little rubber thingy on the end of my pen certainly had not worked for me. We kids were writing things out all the time and being marked on penmanship, and there was a few us that were being scored all time lows on the cursive scale. I never thought that was fair, some were just more gifted in the art of using a pen, but I never voiced it, I would have ended up with lines again.
One of our Grade eight teachers had the brilliant idea to hold penmanship writing contests for each grade. And each winner would have their piece thumb tacked to the big bulletin board in the library. An hour, one afternoon, for a few weeks we wrote out poems on pieces of foolscap. Never once did my work appear thumb tacked to the centre of the board, it did get thumb tacked, but it sat on the outskirts on the outside looking in.
A buddy of mine, and I, well, we had had enough. Our fingers hurt from clenching our pens tight trying our best to coax out flowing and twirly letters. We revolted, held a mutiny, we schemed and devised our plan. When the next poem was handed out for us to copy, we set to it. Every week poems came to us in photocopied, handwritten form and from this we had to transpire our own cursive art. My buddy and I we cheated. We traced. We took our foolscap, placed it over our own teacher's handwriting and traced her letters. We were sure we were going to win that penmanship contest that week. We were willing to bet the farm on it. But alas, cheaters never prosper and neither did we and our traced work was regulated back to sides of the bulletin board. We didn't make centre stage.
As much as my dad thinks that I have missed my calling as an auctioneer, I think I have missed my calling as a doctor. I could have been a great doctor with my indiscernible handwriting skills. I could just skip the medicine part and go straight to writing out "scripts" for patients.
It was my highschooler C that brought my attention back to my penmanship skills. She needed notes for missed classes, stating where her where abouts were that day. I quickly wrote in cursive, a note. C took one look at her note and asked what it said. It was the usual, "C was not in class that day because blah, blah, blah...." note. I wrote another note and took my time with it. It started out neat, but by the end, it was a scrawly mess. I read it to her again, and she took off to school.
"Mom, I had to read your note. Out loud. The secretary took one look at it, and gave it back to me to read to her. Maybe you should just print things."
Christmas card season will soon be upon us. I will receive in my mail cards that will be handwritten, not all beautiful, but they will be legible. Some will be hand printed, some will be written loopy and on a slant. Some will be handwritten in twirls, swirls with swoopy swoops, so fancy that it will be a hard to read who it comes from. Each card that reaches my home, whether it's a penmanship mess or a proper penmanship work of art, each card will find a place thumb tacked to the centre of my bulletin board because in my house penmanship doesn't count!
All that being said........It's Go Time!!!
I learned how to cursvise write in Grade 4. with pencil, with an eraser on top. The day that we learned how to write a capital letter"I" in handwriting was the day that I was absent from school. I can remember where I was too, at the eye doctor, getting fitted for my over sized, pastel coloured, googly, upside down armed glasses to help me see the chalkboard better. I missed the whole lesson on how to write a proper capital letter "I" so when I returned school a short while later, everyone in my class was happily writing capital letter "I" the proper way.
The school that I attended was a little rinky dink country school that put penmanship in high regard. If you had great penmanship, you were going places. With this all being said, I figured out on my own how to write a capital letter "I". I did ask the teacher for help, and she did show me but I wasn't too keen on her way. I liked my way better. Her way was to start with the big loop and swoop over to the tail. I showed her my way. My way was to start with the tail, and end with the loop. Backwards. That's when my teacher asked me to write out a sentence for her. That's when I ended up with a "corrective red rubber triangle shaped put on my pencil" thingy mabobber. Apparently I held my pencil wrong, and this corrective device was going to guide me along the path of perfect penmanship.
WRONG!!!!
Let's fast track through a few years. My rinky dink school was big on doling out "lines" as punishment. I have done my fair share of lines. "I will not forget my homework" was one. "I shall not talk" was another. "I shall not talk back" was another goodie. Those were the main ones I received and please write out one hundred times! As you got up in grades, writing dictionary pages and long passages out of the bible were favourite punishments for teachers.
I like to think that this is why my penmanship suffered. I just wanted to write my lines out quick and get them over and done with. I didn't care what my lines looked like, I wrote them out on the bus on my home. I wrote them in bed, late at night with a flashlight clamped between my teeth so my parents wouldn't find out that I had lines.....AGAIN!! I wrote them on the way to school on the bus with friends helping so my teacher wouldn't dole out a hundred more because I had forgot to do them. I got good at doing lines. I still forgot my homework, I still talked, and I still talked back. Can you tell? Those lines did me a lot of good.
Then one day, a whole bunch of us got lines. Usually, there was a small select group that received lines and I was in that select group. But this time, people who never got lines, got lines. One girl, in my class, who never got lines, got lines too. When she handed in her lines, with all us regular "writers of lines, my teacher held her piece of paper with one hundred perfectly written penmanship lines up the wazoooo, and went on and on how he had never seen a punishment written out so beautifully. He went so far as to pass it around the class for all of us to see, I believe it was even thumb tacked to the bulletin board as a lesson for us regular line writers. Clearly this girl had not written her lines on the bus.
Penmanship was making me angry. The little rubber thingy on the end of my pen certainly had not worked for me. We kids were writing things out all the time and being marked on penmanship, and there was a few us that were being scored all time lows on the cursive scale. I never thought that was fair, some were just more gifted in the art of using a pen, but I never voiced it, I would have ended up with lines again.
One of our Grade eight teachers had the brilliant idea to hold penmanship writing contests for each grade. And each winner would have their piece thumb tacked to the big bulletin board in the library. An hour, one afternoon, for a few weeks we wrote out poems on pieces of foolscap. Never once did my work appear thumb tacked to the centre of the board, it did get thumb tacked, but it sat on the outskirts on the outside looking in.
A buddy of mine, and I, well, we had had enough. Our fingers hurt from clenching our pens tight trying our best to coax out flowing and twirly letters. We revolted, held a mutiny, we schemed and devised our plan. When the next poem was handed out for us to copy, we set to it. Every week poems came to us in photocopied, handwritten form and from this we had to transpire our own cursive art. My buddy and I we cheated. We traced. We took our foolscap, placed it over our own teacher's handwriting and traced her letters. We were sure we were going to win that penmanship contest that week. We were willing to bet the farm on it. But alas, cheaters never prosper and neither did we and our traced work was regulated back to sides of the bulletin board. We didn't make centre stage.
As much as my dad thinks that I have missed my calling as an auctioneer, I think I have missed my calling as a doctor. I could have been a great doctor with my indiscernible handwriting skills. I could just skip the medicine part and go straight to writing out "scripts" for patients.
It was my highschooler C that brought my attention back to my penmanship skills. She needed notes for missed classes, stating where her where abouts were that day. I quickly wrote in cursive, a note. C took one look at her note and asked what it said. It was the usual, "C was not in class that day because blah, blah, blah...." note. I wrote another note and took my time with it. It started out neat, but by the end, it was a scrawly mess. I read it to her again, and she took off to school.
"Mom, I had to read your note. Out loud. The secretary took one look at it, and gave it back to me to read to her. Maybe you should just print things."
Christmas card season will soon be upon us. I will receive in my mail cards that will be handwritten, not all beautiful, but they will be legible. Some will be hand printed, some will be written loopy and on a slant. Some will be handwritten in twirls, swirls with swoopy swoops, so fancy that it will be a hard to read who it comes from. Each card that reaches my home, whether it's a penmanship mess or a proper penmanship work of art, each card will find a place thumb tacked to the centre of my bulletin board because in my house penmanship doesn't count!
Sunday 3 November 2013
The Ghost from Halloween Past
It's the most wonderful time of the year! That time of year when kids put on scary costumes and go around to houses begging for candy! Of course it's Halloween!
My 2 little guys of course will be dressing up and heading out to get some candy from our neighbours. D will be a dragon. He's the dragon from the movie, "How To Train Your Dragon." Which means I have to pet his dragon head when he wears his costume, and train my dragon. I was trying to train my dragon to pick up his toys, but apparently dragons are not trainable to do that sort of thing. My dragon also breathes fire or he tries to. It's more like a dry cough, hairball style. M is a cow. Which is wrong, M is a bull. All I need now is a china shop. He is dressed for exactly what he is...a bull in a china shop.
Their warm fuzzy costumes, and Halloween made me think of my Halloweens growing up, in the past, eons ago.
Cue the dream music, waving lines, up and down and let's flashback to a different time, different place.
I grew up on a dairy farm, outside a little town, like the coal miner's daughter, but not quite the same. My dad didn't have the black lung like coal miners did, but he did have farmer's hands, which were rough, and calloused, and hurt like a son of gun, when he spanked. Or so I've been told, I was of course always an angel, not worthy of spankings... I was the dairy farmer's daughter and so was my little sister.
Growing up in the country, you don't get trick or treaters to your door. I was always some what jealous of the town kids. Houses decorated, jack o lanterns lit, the fun of answering your door and shellling out to kids.
Store bought costumes were not asked for when I was growing up, Halloween and trick or treating was a custom my dutch parents were not brought up with. My mom went along with this Canadian tradition and did her darnedest to make sure we kids got to go and have our night of candy. Mom was a busy lady with four kids, limited resources, her ideas of costumes consisted of using our barn clothes, tin foil, whatever odds and ends were in the sewing basket, and orange red Tangee lipstick for clown makeup.
When Halloween night would arrive, us kids would be all a twitter, looking forward to our night of begging for candy. Of course, we would be dressed as farmers, throw on your barn clothes, rubber boots, your barn toque, your winter barn coat and we were ready to hit the streets of our small town. Yes, it was slightly awkward when we were asked what we were.
"What are you 2 dressed as? Aren't you John's daughters from the sixth line?" townfolk would ask.
"Why we're farmers and yes, he's our dad," my sister and I would reply.
"You're dressed as farmers! Aren't you farmers all the time?!" they would ask.
We tried changing it up from year to year. Still in our barn clothes, but when you add a stick with a hankerchief stuffed with rags tied to the end of your stick, you're a hobo. When you take your barn clothes, the stick with the stuffed hankerchief stuffed with rags tied on the end and paint your face with your mom's Tangee red lipstick, you become that French speaking clown from the 1970's that you used to watch on TVO and even though you didn't understand that weird mime clown, you watched him anyway because there was nothing else to watch. Still barn clothes were the main part of our Halloween costumes. Tin foil taped to our hats...TA DA! Alien Farmers!!!
One year, I don't know where my mom got them, I think she got them from a lady at her work. At this stage in her life, mom went back to being part of the work force. She came home with the most wonderful costumes my sister and I had ever seen. She held out for me a beautiful pink full length spaghetti strapped evening gown, and for my sister, a velour forest green with gold threading jumpsuit. I was a princess that Halloween year, with my bristol board, tin foil covered cone shaped crown with an old sheer curtain glued to the top. My sister was my jestor. Also with a bristol board cone shaped crown on her head. No barn clothes that year! We were trick or treating in style! We flounced up and down those sidewalks, knocking on doors and we answered mightly, that YES! we were John's daughters from the sixth line! And NO! we don't know how many cows he's milking right now, but we'll be sure to let him know that you asked!
Grade Eight was the last year I got out trick or treating, and that was the year I got to go with my friends and I was trick or treating in a different town. We were giggly girls dressed in garbage bags and on the look out for boys. I remember it being cold that night, and garbage bags don't offer the same protection agaisnt the cold as barn clothes do. I was missing my barn clothes costume that night.
My boys in their store bought costumes will have a wonderful time trick or treating. By the time this is posted, trick or treating will have come and gone. The night of Halloween my kitchen looked more like a dressing room. It was like a night at the Oscars, with the numerous costume changes that had taken place. D was a dragon at one point, but that was quickly discarded and he was busy trying to cram his too small spiderman suit on his big self, and then was happy to discover that I had remembered about the too big Ninja costume and he happily put that on with me making modifications to keep it from off his arse. M started his day out as a penguin, morphed into a zebra, and finally settled on his Batman costume with Spiderman mask. It was when I looked at the pile of costumes on the floor, that I missed the days of just slipping on your barn clothes and being the farmer.
From the 4th line,
Arlene
My 2 little guys of course will be dressing up and heading out to get some candy from our neighbours. D will be a dragon. He's the dragon from the movie, "How To Train Your Dragon." Which means I have to pet his dragon head when he wears his costume, and train my dragon. I was trying to train my dragon to pick up his toys, but apparently dragons are not trainable to do that sort of thing. My dragon also breathes fire or he tries to. It's more like a dry cough, hairball style. M is a cow. Which is wrong, M is a bull. All I need now is a china shop. He is dressed for exactly what he is...a bull in a china shop.
Their warm fuzzy costumes, and Halloween made me think of my Halloweens growing up, in the past, eons ago.
Cue the dream music, waving lines, up and down and let's flashback to a different time, different place.
I grew up on a dairy farm, outside a little town, like the coal miner's daughter, but not quite the same. My dad didn't have the black lung like coal miners did, but he did have farmer's hands, which were rough, and calloused, and hurt like a son of gun, when he spanked. Or so I've been told, I was of course always an angel, not worthy of spankings... I was the dairy farmer's daughter and so was my little sister.
Growing up in the country, you don't get trick or treaters to your door. I was always some what jealous of the town kids. Houses decorated, jack o lanterns lit, the fun of answering your door and shellling out to kids.
Store bought costumes were not asked for when I was growing up, Halloween and trick or treating was a custom my dutch parents were not brought up with. My mom went along with this Canadian tradition and did her darnedest to make sure we kids got to go and have our night of candy. Mom was a busy lady with four kids, limited resources, her ideas of costumes consisted of using our barn clothes, tin foil, whatever odds and ends were in the sewing basket, and orange red Tangee lipstick for clown makeup.
When Halloween night would arrive, us kids would be all a twitter, looking forward to our night of begging for candy. Of course, we would be dressed as farmers, throw on your barn clothes, rubber boots, your barn toque, your winter barn coat and we were ready to hit the streets of our small town. Yes, it was slightly awkward when we were asked what we were.
"What are you 2 dressed as? Aren't you John's daughters from the sixth line?" townfolk would ask.
"Why we're farmers and yes, he's our dad," my sister and I would reply.
"You're dressed as farmers! Aren't you farmers all the time?!" they would ask.
We tried changing it up from year to year. Still in our barn clothes, but when you add a stick with a hankerchief stuffed with rags tied to the end of your stick, you're a hobo. When you take your barn clothes, the stick with the stuffed hankerchief stuffed with rags tied on the end and paint your face with your mom's Tangee red lipstick, you become that French speaking clown from the 1970's that you used to watch on TVO and even though you didn't understand that weird mime clown, you watched him anyway because there was nothing else to watch. Still barn clothes were the main part of our Halloween costumes. Tin foil taped to our hats...TA DA! Alien Farmers!!!
One year, I don't know where my mom got them, I think she got them from a lady at her work. At this stage in her life, mom went back to being part of the work force. She came home with the most wonderful costumes my sister and I had ever seen. She held out for me a beautiful pink full length spaghetti strapped evening gown, and for my sister, a velour forest green with gold threading jumpsuit. I was a princess that Halloween year, with my bristol board, tin foil covered cone shaped crown with an old sheer curtain glued to the top. My sister was my jestor. Also with a bristol board cone shaped crown on her head. No barn clothes that year! We were trick or treating in style! We flounced up and down those sidewalks, knocking on doors and we answered mightly, that YES! we were John's daughters from the sixth line! And NO! we don't know how many cows he's milking right now, but we'll be sure to let him know that you asked!
Grade Eight was the last year I got out trick or treating, and that was the year I got to go with my friends and I was trick or treating in a different town. We were giggly girls dressed in garbage bags and on the look out for boys. I remember it being cold that night, and garbage bags don't offer the same protection agaisnt the cold as barn clothes do. I was missing my barn clothes costume that night.
My boys in their store bought costumes will have a wonderful time trick or treating. By the time this is posted, trick or treating will have come and gone. The night of Halloween my kitchen looked more like a dressing room. It was like a night at the Oscars, with the numerous costume changes that had taken place. D was a dragon at one point, but that was quickly discarded and he was busy trying to cram his too small spiderman suit on his big self, and then was happy to discover that I had remembered about the too big Ninja costume and he happily put that on with me making modifications to keep it from off his arse. M started his day out as a penguin, morphed into a zebra, and finally settled on his Batman costume with Spiderman mask. It was when I looked at the pile of costumes on the floor, that I missed the days of just slipping on your barn clothes and being the farmer.
From the 4th line,
Arlene
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