Category Archives: Family News

I am Jealous of Cakes

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Nikki makes cakes.  They are very cool.

look at this wicked minecraft cake look at this wicked red cake

Hellish Hell Train to Hell

They are pretty awesome, just look at those suckers.  Everybody loves them, there is lots of evidence of this.  Not me.  I hate them.

It’s not that I hate how they taste, but I do.  I find them too sweet, in general.  Cake is ruined by all that toothache-inducing icing.  Cake wouldn’t nearly have the reputation it has if we always just served it without icing.  But this post is not about the taste of cake.

I’m jealous of cake because of the time it takes away from my life.  When Nikki sets out to make a cake for someone (and in all honesty it’s always someone we are very close to, and to those people who have received a cake recently or are about to receive a cake, please realize that I don’t hate you, in fact the very reason you got a cake is because we love you, but it’s actually your stinking disgusting terrible birthday cake that I hate), it takes HOURS of planning from concept design, shopping for the right supplies and props, and then baking the damn thing.  Then comes the worst part: Hundreds of curse-filled hunched over bleary hours assembling, rolling, smoothing, agonizing, trimming, all the while gibbering and gnashing and shrieking.

Note that I do all of this while Nikki calmly, cheerfully and efficiently makes the cake, occasionally asking me to gibber more quietly.

It’s not that she sucks at making cakes, she’s really really good at it, it’s that by the end of that damn cake I am jealous of the time she spends on it and not me.  There, I said it.  Cake making time is after all the other things have been done, time that should be spent on me, obviously.  I deserve that time, clearly, because I am far more interesting, not as crumby (usually), less demanding (just), and contain fewer calories.

In conclusion, cake has done nothing for me, and for that, I hate, yes, hate it.

I feel better now.

Order up! Dinner and Love, hold the onions

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If you are lucky like me you had a mom and a grandmother or two who were the source of magical meals and desserts that you remember forever.  There was no better food to be had, your young palate was amazed at how good it was.  Sure there were some misses here and there (although I did manage to enjoy Welsh Rarebit somehow), but for the most part it was all magic.  Once in a while at home there would be a really special dinner, or when you visited your grandmother there would be your favourite cookies out, somehow ready for you.  You never once questioned how amazing that was, what a coincidence it was that she just had this stuff ready, no matter how elaborate the meal.

As I get older, and the kids get older naturally they become ever more appreciative of good food, and their favourites.  Seeing the excited faces and hearing the appreciation is awesome and rewarding, one of the true joys of parenting.

Ok, enough of the inspirational tripe and misty eyed Hallmark-ed Pinterest-bait.  One thing that never ever crossed my ungrateful little kid mind EVEN ONCE was just how much back-breaking work and money went into feeding me.  Holy crap, it’s absolutely unbelievable how much work it is to feed a family well.  Nikki does an incredible job of feeding us, with appreciative sighs and ahhs all around, but man there’s a metric fuck-ton of work behind that, not to mention the cost.  The boys are getting bigger all the time, and the quantities of food they will eat in their teens is beginning to become apparent, forget the casual dinner guests that appear ever more regularly.

For instance, just the other night we had dinner for Nikki’s Mom and Dad (Darlene’s birthday!), which was all good.  Aunt Pat tagged along at our insistence, which was awesome.  Jordy had a friend over, no problem.  Her boyfriend was scheduled to come too, but couldn’t make it at the last.  So what started as a regular dinner on a Wednesday night ended up as dinner for 10…  Nikki killed it too, amazing roasts (yes, two roasts) and most of a bag of potatoes mashed and creamy amazing, and veggies.  Everyone loved it.  What I’m sure wasn’t obvious was the fact that getting that meal on the table took two trips to the grocery store (one for the extra roast, one for the rest) and a couple hours of prep.  Forget the rest of the things that were done, house cleaning and tidying, dishes washing, etc.  It’s a stupendous amount of effort to cook for that many people.

The most messed up part of it all is how COMMONPLACE and ordinary it’s all getting.  It would have been the whole damn week getting ready for that dinner when we were younger.  Now?  Meh, Nikki knocks out a masterpiece with a few hours notice.  The magic becomes familiar and everyday to us parents, but there you go.  We wouldn’t change it for all the unicorns, puppies, and rainbow muffin baskets in the world***….

 

*** Bonus Hallmark Norman Rockwell finish.

In which I discover I’m just a young Grandpa

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You know how you paid attention to your grandfather’s little personal habits and thought to yourself, wow that’s pretty quirky.  Usually old people’s quirky translates easily to endearing.  You probably wondered just how those habits were formed, and assumed that old people did things in strange ways long before you were born, and Grandpa is just still doing those same things today in a cute, anachronistic way.

Bullshit.

I’ll tell you how it happens, because it’s happening to me at the ripe old age of 40.

I mentioned last year to Nikki that I started to buy these containers of two hard boiled eggs, with cheese and crackers from the cafeteria at work and eat them for breakfast.  I noted that I wasn’t as hungry for lunch because the eggs kept me a little fuller than just fruit would.  Pretty logical, an astute observation about my caloric intake and appetite.  I didn’t see any of the danger signs because a man in his thirties is still young and virile.

A year later though, as a man in his forties who has been doing the same thing most mornings for over a year now, I now realize I’m already on the slippery slope of Quirky Old Grandpa Courtney and picking up speed.  It’s too late for me now, even if I stopped doing that egg thing immediately.  I am conditioned now.  If I went cold turkey I would be grumpy and hungry well before lunchtime.  If I changed customers (no doubt that will happen eventually) I would probably spend some time looking around for options to keep buying my hard boiled eggs in the morning at the new customer location.  If I couldn’t find anything I would probably start making my own and bringing them.  That’s the kiss of death right there.  The amount of effort and energy I would expend to keep that habit as close as possible to the SAME would increase.  The defining criteria of old people as I recall from my 8,9,10 year old eyes was that they like everything to be exactly the SAME. The catch is that I have spent 40 years now trying to develop good habits.  The problem is that after 40 habits just become doing things the SAME.

The only thing that separates me from Grandpa now is when I do the same damn thing I’m just weird, and I don’t have the benefit of being really old and also OCD.  Cause that’s just cute, instead of what I am now.  Which is just weird.

So, the threshold of old is defined by the new desire to maintain habits that require increasing amounts of energy to maintain, which make no sense to people who have not yet crossed the threshold.  All I can do is to shout advice from the other side of the threshold back to the young people.  Who will ignore me because from their side of the threshold I’m just cute old Courtney, clutching his eggs and waving his arms and yelling adorably in his old man way; something about cassette tapes and rotary dial phones.

The Tale of Harvey and the Swear Words

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Did I ever tell you the time when Harvey taught our then 8-year old daughter all of the swear words in English?  No?  Here’s how it went.

Many years ago, probably around 8 BL (Before Lloyd), Harvey had developed a stomach bug of some sort as all dogs do from time to time.  He had the runs and was throwing up, so I was giving him my by-then standard practice of “no kibble for you if you are stupid enough to eat ALL of the cat poop in the park at once”.  Usually a day of fasting followed by some plain white rice for a day or so put him right as rain.  Anyway, this particular night he was still having some accidents and keeping us up until all hours  one night when I finally tired of him ralfing on the rug (what is it about dogs and puking on a rug?  I mean they are MAGNETICALLY drawn to carpet when they feel sick, forget for a minute that probably 80% of our entire house is some form of hard flooring that is easy to clean up)  and I put him in our bathroom so I could at least clean it off the tile if he got sick.  I immediately fell into bed and back to sleep, but Nikki stayed up listening to Harv whine about being stuck in the bathroom.  Finally her soft, sweet, gentle female heart couldn’t take it any more (and she couldn’t sleep through his bitching), and she woke me up and asked me if I thought it would be ok if we let Harv out now as he hadn’t had an accident recently.  I sleepily agreed and staggered over to the bathroom door to let him out so I could salvage the last couple of hours of the night. Naturally I was too sleepy then to predict what happened, although it’s as obvious as can be now.

I opened the door to let Harv out, which he was very grateful for.  So grateful that he popped out of the bathroom and immediately barfed on the carpet at my feet.  I responded with a strangled roar and Harvey decided that it was time to book it before he was hauled back into the bathroom.  However, he wasn’t quite done throwing up at the moment, so he started running down the hallway towards the stairs, barfing as he went.  Finally my sluggish brain kicked into action and I proceeded to give chase in an attempt to get him to stop so I would only have one pile of dog vomit to clean up.  Picture me in my gitch (sorry for that) yelling incoherently at Harvey, running after him down the stairs wide-legged so I don’t step in the barf.  I am essentially the boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark, if the boulder yelled a lot and wore boxer briefs, and Harrison Ford was a constantly puking dog.

Harv was pretty quick when he was young and so I didn’t catch up to him until we were downstairs in the hallway on the hardwood and grabbed him and shoved his butt downwards to keep him in one spot.  Unfortunately I staved my middle finger on the floor in the process pretty hard.

At that moment you might say that I was a little upset.  I might have said some things that don’t need to be entered here really.  There was a crackling blue haze surrounding me, and I went on for quite a while pretty loudly before I was able to regain control.  At this point Nikki is very wisely still upstairs, probably trying to decide if I was going to commit just one murder or two that night.  The next hour or so was spent cleaning dog vomit off the carpet with nine fingers.  Harv was suitably chastised already, I didn’t need to do anything more than just look at him without the guilt radiating outwards.  Finally we got back to bed for the now tiny bit of sleep left in the night.  I got up, showered, got dressed and walked downstairs to see Jordy eating her breakfast at the table, and the first thing out of her mouth?

“I heard you last night.  I didn’t know you swore like that.”

Sigh. That was the first time either one of us had broken that particular barrier, I didn’t realize that I had awakened Jordy with my rather unfortunate outburst.  So now I have to deal with an 6-year-old’s loss of innocence too.  Awesome.

Nikki asked me to open a new jar of jam before I left for work, which I did (while favouring my throbbing hurt finger), and which immediately exploded jam all over my clean shirt.  The fact that I didn’t further demonstrate a few words for Jordy again (I mean she already heard them all last night, what the heck, right?) was evidence of a stupendous act of self control that Tibetan monks still speak about today in awed, hushed tones.

So there you go.  The tale of when Harvey taught Jordy the worst words I know in the English language.

Grocery Store Mission Impossible

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Grocery shopping on the weekend with Nikki together in the store, I remarked that we were just like real people.  Nikki knew exactly what I meant because we were together in the store, unhurried, browsed around a bit, picked up a few things, paid and left to go home together and watch a movie.  Like real people.  This was made possible because we had no children (thanks Mom!), and we were in full on work-mode at the house this weekend.  It was a rare freedom to just work all day on things that needed doing, then stop when we were tired and just go and be together and do stuff.  Usually a trip to the grocery store is much different:
I will be driving home through traffic on a weeknight, in constant communication with the team at home via hands free call.

“Sitrep, Lincoln Fields, light traffic.”
“Ok, what’s your ETA?”
“Inbound, probably 15 minutes”
“Affirmative, 15 minutes.”
“At this speed I will be able to complete objective B (the grocery store) with 8 minutes to spare.”
“Affirmative, copy that.  Dinner will be complete in 34 minutes, that is a hard stop.  Copy?”
“Copy.  Still able to achieve objective B, just ran two red lights and cut off an old lady.”

And even when I get to the grocery store, it’s not all strolling and thoughtfully reading labels and making the right choices for my family.  Nope.  It’s more like four wheeled cart slides around the dairy case, sneakers screeching on the terrazzo, fighting for purchase to change direction and get to the deli counter to buy ham before supper goes critical and we lose the window.  All the while, my phone is to my ear sandwiched between my sweaty cheek and hunched shoulder, getting updates on how the rest of the team is doing.

“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, do you acknowledge?”

And at home, Nikki has been carefully orchestrating the after school melee, cheerfully and efficiently defying the laws of time and space and somehow making more simultaneous stops at more locations than we even have children, and still managing to find something that we can eat.  How does that even work?  She was in four places at the same time last Tuesday, all 5km apart from each other.  My wife the Time Lord, sexy and omnipotent all at once.  A regular week at our house?  2 swimming lessons, 3 Karate lessons, 2 drivers ed classes, Jordy works 3 times, dance lesson for Cael, dance lesson for us, dog training, and for some dang reason we are having a HELL of a time getting back to the gym.  Pussies.

Anyway, at some point I lurch to a halt in the tactical Sienna in our laneway, leap out into a shoulder roll with the grocery bags and sprint through the front door, delivering the final supplies for dinner with no margin left, often opening the packages as I run down the hall so I can slam dunk the food into the pot.  It gets flash cooked for 30 seconds and then scooped out and put onto plates that are then slid under the waiting forks of the rest of the family.

I dare you to try to eat a leisurely and relaxed dinner at that point.  I’m done in about 3.5 seconds, and have flipped the plates and cutlery into the dishwasher, shuriken-like, and moved onto the next thing.  Usually still chewing my last bite as I fire up the tactical Sienna for the next mission.

That’s most week nights at our house.