History - Say it with flowers...

Spring in Ottawa means flowers, especially tulips. During WWII, Dutch royal family took refuge in Canada and Princess Margriet was born in Ottawa. Well sort of. The maternity ward of the hospital was temporarily declared to be extraterritorial by the Canadian government, thereby allowing her royal citizenship to be solely Dutch as required by the constitution. Beyond this, the First Canadian Army was very active in the liberation of the Netherlands from Nazi occupation. In appreciation, the Dutch people sent bucket loads of tulips (aka the Dutch national flower) to Ottawa and then the royal family sent over still more. This became an annual tradition, and has evolved into the Canadian Tulip Festival. Every year there are fireworks, loads of live music and, of course, tons of tulips, all over a long weekend. Nice!

Dad, Pam, Teri & Grandpa – this is one reason May next year would be a great time to visit.

What Dreams May Come

I had the coolest dream last night. My recall starts when I went through a secret passage at an R&B club to reach a large inner courtyard where an international martial arts expo was to be held. However, before the expo could start there was an opening act. It was an Ed Sullivan era Beatles tribute band, comprised entirely of chimpanzees even wearing the correct suits. And they were terrible, really terrible. They kept forgetting tunes/lyrics and couldn’t play their instruments very well. It turns out the reason they were so bad is that they were impostors. I learned this in my dream when the real Ed Sullivan era Beatles tribute band, comprised entirely of chimpanzees (also wearing the same suits, but in a different colour), turned up for their gig. Sadly, I awoke before there was a musical monkey-fight at the martial arts expo.

And I know many of you just come here for pics of the kids. So having suffered through reading my most awesome dream, here is something for you as well.

Flower Power

Summer is well upon us. It’s warm, green and just bloody beautiful. So much so that today Jane scarpered out of the office a little early so we could all go down to the Governor General’s park where, among other things, the dandelions are in full bloom. Dandelions are a weed that is nearly impossible to remove from lawns and which produce a sea of yellow flowers well known to all children and the mothers that receive them by the small grubby handful every spring.

I was sitting on the shaded edge of the lawn when Tom brought over a handful of the dry white fluffy seed heads that follow the yellow flower. I took them and blew upon them, sending a great cloud of fluff into the air. Tom’s eyes went wide as he danced through the fluffy cloud.

“Yayyy! That was AMAZING!”

...And then he ran off to gather another handful for the first of several repeat performances.

There will come a time when nothing I say will be right, and nothing I do will be cool, but today I stand shoulder to shoulder with Ancient Gods. Just as they breathed life into the world, I use my breath to bring the undiluted wonder of childhood - in the form of dandelion fluff - to my son’s life. I have certainly had worse afternoons.

Pee Wee Sport is Upon Us!

Not much more to say really. Last weekend Tom started playing in a weekend soccer league for the 4-5yr olds. Very silly, but good fun.









Oh, and Tom's team, the Eagles, lost 1-0 to the Falcons. Three of the cheating little buggers line up shoulder to shoulder in front of the goal every time the ball gets anywhere near their 1/2 of the field. I don't know how the ref missed seeing it...

Meanwhile, Back in Toronto...

My Saturday pretty much disappeared down a sink-hole of waiting at a very busy tire place for them to get to my ‘non-appointment’ tire needs. Around lunchtime I finally dropped just over $300 on two tires. One to replace the puncture and one to be an actual spare as opposed to the completely useless ‘emergency tire’ we were carrying. While I was there, Jane took the kids for a bit of a walk around downtown Toronto and for a ride on the subway. Lillian’s nap took over the afternoon, and then for Jane's birthday dinner we ate just down the street at a ‘Red Lobster’ which was surprisingly good. The kids had big cups of milk and tasty pieces of baked chicken with some nicely steamed fresh broccoli. They also really enjoyed seeing the actual lobster in the big tank by the door. And then it was back to the still too-hot room to put the kids to bed.

Sunday we went to the National Gallery of Ontario to see the King Tut exhibit, which was very cool. It also had great acoustics, as my less interested children demonstrated, with the result that we got to see the exhibit rather more quickly than we would have liked. After that we walked around the gallery a bit and had a snack in the cafeteria. Late in the visit we discovered the new children’s room, so I stayed there with the kids to give Jane freedom to wander the gallery for the last half hour we were there. Then Jane took Lillian back to the room for her nap while Tom and I went to get a new GPS. Congrats honey! ...for your birthday you get two tires plus labour and a still not coin-operated GPS, all for apx $500. Yay.

Monday, ‘home at last’ day. Just the small matter of a 5 hour drive with 2 small kids, but 1st a stop at the Toronto Zoo. This was the best part of the trip, but even so there were disappointments. Many of the African animals (Tom’s favourites) weren’t out yet, and Jane saw a ‘tentacled water snake’. To be honest, it would have been more aptly named the ‘mustachioed snake’, but I guess tentacled sounds better. The biggest disappointment of the visit would have to have been Lillian’s. We walked around a corner to the baboon viewing window, revealing a big hill covered with frolicking baboons, and her little face fell like a stone. She had thought we were going to see ‘balloons’. I would never have imagined a child could be so disappointed with actual monkeys.

And if you are wondering why there are no pictures of this travesty of a long weekend, its because the camera battery died as soon as we reached Toronto.

I really don’t feel any need to go back to Toronto. I am sure there are plenty of things we didn’t do, but ultimately it’s a big city, we have kids, and most of the ‘big city’ things I like to do aren’t very child-friendly. Plus, for an extra three hours in the car we could have been in New York. We have been to New York and I would like to go back there. And, unlike Toronto, we know people in New York.

So yeah, I suspect that the only reason I will see Toronto again is because its on the way to Niagara.

Up Next , the Dance of the Single Parent!

As I type Jane is flapping (her own description) about the house getting ready for a 10am flight out of Ottawa. DFAIT is sending her overseas for the first time, and I will be home with the shorties for the duration. It was going to be a relatively easy 5 days (out Sunday, back Friday), but a certain volcano in Iceland has buggered pretty well everybody on Earth's travel plans, and added two days to Jane’s travel time. She also get to go 2/3rds of the way around the world heading West, instead of 1/3 of the way around by going East.

I intend to spend my evenings watching movies that I like and she has no interest in, and putting in some serious time painting toy soldiers. I’ll probably also get a spicy pizza or two.

Its going to be a long week.

The Not So Good Friday

We, and roughly ½ of Ottawa, decided to drive to Toronto for the Easter Long Weekend and Jane’s birthday. It was, for the most part, an epic disaster.

Everything started fine. We drove up to Kingston before stopping for lunch. Its a lovely city, the site of Canada’s Royal Military College and generally steeped in colonial era history. It is also where things started to go wrong. We had our picnic lunch on a hillside at Fort Henry, the carpark for which is on the exact opposite side of the fort from the entrance. So, after lunch when Thomas declared himself in need of a toilet, I charged ½ way around the fort to discover if it was open (Good Friday remember) and if open whether they had public toilets. They were and they did. So I charged all the way back to the carpark, collected Thomas, and charged all the way back to the entrance and toilets with Thomas in arms for a thankfully successful toilet break. All of which brought on a rare (and mild) asthma attack. I suffered childhood asthma, and even though it is rarely an issue I keep a puffer in the house just in case. The puffer was of course still in the house.

So, a bit over 100kms of wheezing later, we pulled off for a break at a petrol station about an hour from downtown Toronto. Jane pops the GPS unit into her bag and everybody hops out to stretch their legs for a pleasant ½ an hour. Back in the car for the final push, and the GPS will not start. It continues to not start until Jane goes inside to buy a map of Toronto. While she is inside I discover the coin that has found its way into the SD card slot on the side of the unit while it was in Jane’s bag. Seems she had not put the GPS into its carry case before popping it therein.

*sigh* The thing you need to understand about my lovely wife at this point, is that she is a terrible navigator. Really, just not good at all. And so as we set of into Toronto, the largest city in Canada and a city neither of us have ever visited before, I was a little concerned. She tried very hard, and I know she tried very hard because only once did she send me into the extreme left of the 5 lanes when I needed to take a right hand exit. Only the once. Other than that little mishap we found our way directly to the Hotel where I pulled into a parking space, immediately hitting some glass in the gutter and puncturing a tire. In the middle of downtown Toronto on Good Friday. OK, fine. Its we are in the middle of a completely unknown concrete jungle late in the day on Good Friday, so there isn’t really anything that can be done about it. Everybody up to the room.

…where the air conditioning wasn’t working on the hottest Easter weekend on record. Yay.

And here endeth the first, and admittedly worst, day of the holiday. The rest will follow when I stop twitching enough to work the keyboard again.