Autumn comes, then let us be glad

I got in the car with the kids last Thursday to find that the air conditioning had gone out—but only on the driver's side. I'm guessing it's a problem with the blend door actuator because I have been curious about those little animal-scratching noises I've been hearing/feeling by my steering wheel and the maker of this video describes such noises. 

Did we take the car into the mechanic in May to get a clean bill of health before driving across the country? Yes.

Did they say anything about the clicking/scratching sound when the A/C was running? No. 

I mean, I didn't either, but it's been doing it for such a long time that it almost feels like it has always been a part of the van. 

No matter. 

It's not making those noises anymore. And it's not making cool air anymore, either. 

Now, math isn't precisely my strong suit, but I'm pretty good at putting two and two together.

Make a piece of furniture

What I really wanted to do yesterday was go hiking, but we're all trying to get over a cold and I was really much too sick to actually go hiking. This illness seems to be different from the little cough we all had last week (and no one over here has tested positive for COVID), involving just a sore throat, full body aches and only a minimal fever, if any. 

I was having a body achey day yesterday, so hiking wouldn't have necessarily been a good option. But for some reason I felt building furniture would be??

I recently finished reading Beehive Girl, which was a charming and quick read. The author is a young little thing—who has her PhD and one baby—and reading and trying to relate to her story felt like the time my friend Amanda pointed out that we were living life "in reverse" of each other when I started graduate school, having already birthed my passel of children, while she was getting ready to have her first, having already finished with graduate school. 

There were a few things I would have questioned as an editor (though I was not the editor for this particular book, which is through BCC Press, where I've done a smidge of editing), such as when she made a claim that she was worried about ticks dropping from the trees. She's a biologist so I felt like that could have been researched a little better (ticks do not drop from trees; I don't care how many born-and-bred Southerners or New Englanders or what have you might tell you otherwise). 

But that mistake was one I was able to swallow pretty easily and overall it was just a quick, charming read (as previously mentioned). 

I appreciated her optimism, which at times I even felt was tinged with hubris. For example, one of the first big projects she discusses is "making a piece of furniture." At first she selected a rather expensive and complicated toy box system that her aunt/mentor ends up talking her out of in favour of a cubby/bench system that required less wood and less work. She allotted a single day to construct this piece of furniture from the ground up, having never used any sort of power tools, and also driving for, like, six hours!

Needless to say, she did not finish her project in a single afternoon (and then hilariously—and tragically—relates how her car broke down on the way home so she ended up having to return to her aunt's house to spend the night with her baby and ended up with the stomach flu as well, embarrassingly vomiting on the kitchen floor). 

So, I mean...she typically got humbled pretty quick when she was too ambitious with her plans. And who hasn't started a 5-minute project that turns into 3 hours...that turns into 3 days...that turns into 3 weeks...

Andrew and I have certainly tackled many a project with a bit too much confidence. On the one hand, these projects have taught us that we lack many basic fix-it skills. On the other hand, these projects have taught us a lot of basic fix-it skills that we previously lacked. 

Learning is messy and slow. And that's okay.

A busy week

 Either this week was terribly busy or we've just gotten so used to having Andrew home most of the time that it feels oppressive when he has to work and commute every day. In addition to jury duty (to which he was summoned for—and then released from—on Wednesday morning), Andrew had a number of meetings that he had to go to campus for. He ended up being on campus on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, with the jury selection on Wednesday. So we're pretty much worn out this week!

On Monday, though, we went for a walk in the park after dinner, and stayed to have family home evening! Andrew taught us all how to make origami frogs and then when he moved on to origami cranes I excused myself to play with Phoebe in the park because (1) as you can see she was getting into everything and (2) origami cranes are one of the few origami patterns I'm proficient in. 

Bubble days

Our neighbours have the funnest little bubble station. They can often be found blowing bubbles and are so welcoming to anyone who wants to join them. Janelle rests a plastic lid on top of a cooler. She has a little dish for bubbles and some wonderful bubble wands and doesn't seem to mind that the kids spill all over the place (which is something that stresses me out to no end). She just appreciates having kids over to play with her little boy so she can kick up her heels for a minute (and she sets out camping chairs for all the parents so they can join her for a chat while the kids play). 

Schelpping through the swamp of sautéed mushrooms

For the life of me, I can't remember the title of this particular book...but years ago we read a story that talked about a child growing up and the changes that happened. One day this child "climbed the mountain of cooked carrots," meaning that they gained the ability to eat their vegetables without complaining. The book wasn't remotely about carrots, but this is the line that my kids clung to. Benjamin started ribbing Zoë about her dislike for cooked carrots (and pretty much everything on the face of the planet) and Zoë got upset that he was teasing her. 

 

And then one day she ate some roasted carrots and found them to be quite palatable and Benjamin exclaimed that she had finally "climbed the mountain of cooked carrots!"

 

That's precisely why it takes a lot of tasting to decide whether or not you actually like things. 

 

It was very convenient that—after 37 years or so of refusing to eat tomatoes—Andrew realized that tomatoes are good on some things...like sandwiches. The kids learned that even grown ups can expand their preferences!

 

We've been trying all sorts of unusual (to us) foods: dragon fruit, star fruit, papaya, guava, eggplant. Mushrooms don't quite fall into the same kind of exotic categories these other foods might fall into, but it's also not something that typically lands on our weekly shopping list, either. Benjamin is always begging for mushrooms and sometimes Andrew will oblige him. This week was one of those weeks.

 

Benjamin was very excited. A few of our other kids—including Zoë—were not. 

 

For lunch the other day, Benjamin sautéed some mushrooms to put on his Ramen and I told him just to cook the entire package (because once you open a pack of mushrooms they tend to...wilt...or whatever...quite quickly). I had some with my noodles as well. And to my surprise when Benjamin offered Zoë some she said she would try one and then would see if she wanted more. 

 

So she ate one, declared it delicious, and then ate two servings of them! And not mixed in with her soup or anything, but just...plain, on a little plate. It was quite surprising! 

 

Today when Benjamin put the leftover sautéed mushrooms on some leftover "essential" birthday pizza...Zoë did the same thing. 

 

Not only has she climbed the mountain of cooked carrots, she's schlepped through the swamp of sautéed mushrooms as well!

 

*****

 

Now I'm going to talk about soup for a minute because putting mushrooms into my soup at lunch the other day reminded me that mushroom flavoured Ramen used to be quite normal in my house growing up. Beef, chicken, mushroom, oriental...all normal flavours.

 

From what I'm reading, "oriental" flavour has—rightly—been changed to "soy sauce" flavoured. Calling a food oriental is a little...orientalistic. 

 

But I'm having a hard time rewiring my brain to stop calling Ramen "oriental noodles" since that is—by and large—still what Ramen is called in Canada (as evidence: this blog post from 2019 and this short film from 2018). That's what I grew up calling it, with an alternative being "ichiban" (which is part of a brand name for noodles, and which simply means 'the best' in Japanese (or, like, "first")).

 

I remember visiting my cousins in the states once and they asked if I wanted some Top Ramen for lucnh and I was like, "What is this thing of which you speak?"

 

I had no idea what they were talking about because I had never used the word "ramen" in my life. 

 

Sapporo Ichiban: Japanese-style Noodles? Yes. 

Mr. Noodles: Instant Noodles? Yes.

No Name Brand: Oriental Noodles? Yes.

 

But I had never come across the word "ramen." 

 

"You know—ramen! Like 'Top Ramen!'"

 

"Yeah, no...I don't know what 'Top Ramen' is, so..."

 

They produced a package and I was like, "Oh, you mean..." 

 

And then I'm sure I said "oriental noodles."

 

Now, to my mind these days, that title sounds far too orientalistic (as I mentioned) and I've largely adopted the use of "ramen noodles" instead, but I do wonder how to change an entire culture. Like, "oriental noodles" is printed on the food packages. There are many restaurants with "oriental noodles" in the name. Is it something that needs to be changed? Or is it, culturally, okay? I don't even know!

 

Where I grew up there was a rather large Asian population. Vancouver's population is about 20% Chinese (or Chinese-heritage). Combined with South Asian (14.2%), Filipino (5.5%), Korean (2.4%), West Asian (2.5%), Southeast Asian (2.2%) and Japanese (1.2%) populations, that puts the Asian population at 47.6% of Vancouver residents. 43% of Vancouver residents are considered "European" (which is how we would be identified if we lived there). So...there are a lot of Asians in that area of Canada and that's where I grew up with "oriental noodles."

 

To put that in perspective for my children, we feel like there is a large Asian population here in Atlanta (which is a pretty popular place for Korean diaspora to land), but Atlanta's population is only 5% Asian (a category containing Chinese (0.7%), Korean (0.8%), Vietnamese (0.7%) and Indian 1.5%). 

 

To be fair, in the mid-1990s, the European population in Vancouver was approximately 67%, while the Asian population was "merely" 27% or so. That still blows Atlanta's 5% out of the water.

 

And that's fine. I'm not calling Atlanta homogenous by any means. It just happens that the Pacific Northwest has a large population of Asian immigrants (so I grew up using chopsticks but, like, couldn't purchase tortillas in a grocery store because Vancouver has only 1.4% of a Latin American population today (and a mere 0.76% in mid-1990s)), whereas Atlanta's Hispanic population is about 10% (Salt Lake City is about 20%, Los Angeles is about 50%). And Atlanta is, you know, like 32% Black, whereas Vancouver is only 1.6% Black (today; but only 0.2% Black when I was growing up). 

 

All this is to say that somehow in a place with a relatively large Asian population, I grew up calling Ramen "oriental noodles" and I'm just not sure how I feel about that, precisely. 

Happy "essential" birthday to Andrew!

It stormed pretty hard last night—not so much that it flooded the basement or anything, but still pretty stormy. I listened to the rain as drifted in and out of sleep while I fought with Phoebe about whether or not we should be sleeping (guess who was on which side of that argument). I woke up to the unmistakable THOOM of the power going out and thought about checking on the basement...but Phoebe was asleep right beside me and I figured pretty much anything of value had already been moved out of the path of the flood, anyway. 

The power came back on around 5:00 in the morning, by my calculations (from information gathered from the flashing alarm clock, which alerted me of precisely how many hours had passed since it turned back on). We woke up in the morning and began our rush to get ready for church—stuffing the children into their Sunday best, filling their bellies with breakfast, brushing their hair and their teeth. 

We were right in the thick of it when we realized no one had seen Benjamin.

He wasn't in his bed. He wasn't downstairs playing LEGO. He wasn't answering the full-house announcement. Had he gone outside? 

His shoes were all inside and the front door was locked. Perhaps he'd gone out the garage door...but that door was locked, too...

Fortunately, checking the garage door led Andrew past the couch, where he found Benjamin sound asleep. He woke up very disoriented and spoke nonsense for a good ten minutes before he finally woke up enough to eat breakfast and get dressed. It was really quite concerning, so we were glad he snapped out of it.

Once he was dressed, he went to wait in the van while we put some finishing touches on the other kids and gathered up items for my church bag and collected all our sheet music and hymnals and...I was just putting on my cute little fall booties for the first time this season when my phone buzzed. It was a message from Grandpa:

"Church is canceled."

"Oh. Why?" I asked. "Power outage?"

"Yep."

The pool and cooler weather

Summer is waning, but we've had a few good pool days in September so far.

Spicy juice!

I wrote about Phoebe having many, many potty accidents the first little while after coming home from our trip. I began to worry she might be developing a UTI, but it was also a long weekend and I didn't want to have to take her into urgent care or anything (especially since she didn't have a fever or anything), so we just gave her plenty of baths, plied her with as much cranberry juice as she would take (which wasn't much, honestly), and encouraged her to void her bladder frequently. 

By the time Tuesday rolled around she was back to her regular potty-going self and has been great ever since. She takes herself potty frequently or will ask for assistance. It's such a relief! 

(Like most people on the planet, I don't actually enjoy potty training tiny humans (though I do enjoy the after math because, like most people on the planet, I don't actually enjoy changing diapers either)). 

The cranberry juice we got for her was 100% cranberry juice, which is as tart as can be! She was excited about the word "juice" because she'd had some apple juice on the plane (and that was yummy) and because one of her favourite books has the line "a moose and a goose together have juice." 

Juice is a pretty wonderful concept! 

We don't have it very often at our house, and—wow!—what a sweet treat it is!

But cranberry juice, as it turns out, was not delectable. The rest of us enjoyed drinking it, but Phoebe did not. I even watered it down for her and mixed in some honey...at which point I told Andrew he probably could have gotten one of the cranberry cocktails for her (the kind that are like 95% apple juice, 5% cranberry). 

In spite of the less delicious cranberry juice, the concept of "juice" was quite a romantic idea in her little toddler mind. 

*****

DeWinton and High River (August 25)

Josie couldn't take much time off work, but she was able to join us over the weekend. On Friday morning we went back to visit the various playgrounds in the neighbourhoods near the hotel—and found a cute little frog that we caught to take a picture to send to the kids at home—before heading to the airport to pick up Auntie Josie.

The Farm (August 28)

This is the picture I snapped of the Happy Face Barn (outside of Cayley, Alberta) on the way back to High River from Grassy Lake. 

We didn't actually return to High River. Instead we went to Okotoks! But I was happy to see the Happy Face Barn because it's a famous local landmark (it means there's just about 10 minutes left until you're home!) and I wasn't sure I'd get to see it! We weren't sure whether David would be able to meet us in Okotoks or whether we'd have to drive up to his place in Airdrie (which would mean we'd take a different route and enter Calgary from the east rather from the south). But, clearly we drove up on Highway 2 and we saw the barn, which has at times been used for political statements (though, in all honesty, I'm not sure our politics align because they were opposing providing farm "employees minimum wage, vacation pay and injury compensation benefits," which are all things that working people should...you know...have access to (Bill 6 has since been replaced by the Farm Freedom & Safety Act, which clarifies many things in the bill...but still requires minimum wage and maternity leave and things of that nature and I can't figure why anyone would be grumpy about stuff like that). 

Anyway, I was just happy to see the Happy Face Barn.