Get The Party Started

Everybody's waiting for me to arrive.
I'm coming up so you better get this party started...
- Pink

After much anticipation, my little godson made his grand entrance into this world. After a long and arduous day for Mom and Dad, he is a little treasure for them to cherish, absolutely adorable. For the last week, it seemed we were all on pins and needles, excited, nervous, waiting for the show to start, waiting for him to arrive and get the party started...

It was the first time Pacino got to hold a child that tiny (actually, it was my first time too!) and I think he was a little smitten. I know he’ll be a great dad one day, but I don’t know if we’re mentally ready for that... In fact, I don’t think anyone can be mentally ready to become a parent. Even with 9 months to ponder over the enormity of it all, it’s hard to fathom that every detail of that child’s survival is dependent on your ability to supply it ...Talk about pressure...

But it seems like everyone is up to the task and enjoying it. No matter how exhausting it can be, they keep telling me it’s all worth it, I just have to wonder...am I ready to give up my independence? Am I being selfish? Up until now, we were kind of putting off the whole parenthood thing until the house renos were done, but now that we’re almost at that threshold, am I prepared for such a challenge? I feel like there are so many things that I have to do before that happens, but then again, the clock is ticking and I do want kids. There was a time, many years ago, when I used to work at a fertility clinic (earning my way through university), and after working there for 2 years I became majorly paranoid thinking - what if I can’t get pregnant one day when I want to, could I go through this heartache? After all, month after month, I would see those same patients marching in and out of the clinic trying to get pregnant. Back then it seemed to me that women spent their whole single sex life trying to avoid getting pregnant, and then spent their married sex life doing everything in their power to get it to happen. How ironic life can be. Now that all my friends are either getting pregnant, thinking about getting preggers, or are about to pop, it seems that all those paranoid thoughts are niggling their way into my brain again. What if...what if..?
What if I just let nature take its course...

That's Life

- Frank Sinatra

Life is fleeting.

Yesterday, as Al & I were preparing to go to my parents for Father’s day, I noticed a little bird frolicking on the bottom step of the pool (pool is still not filled up). At first I thought, how cute, he’s taking a little bath in our (unchlorinated) swamp. Then I saw him dive into the main pool water and noticed he was actually trapped in the water and about to drown. So, as any other animal lover would have done, I grabbed the skimming net and fished him out of there...only to realize that he is a baby! A little baby red-breasted robin fallen out of his nest at the first sprouting of his yet-undeveloped wings. At first I thought his foot was broken since one of his claws was at a weird angle, there was also a juicy moisture on both ears and he was breathing very heavily, although this seemed quite normal after his ordeal - after all, he had fallen about 20-30 feet from his nest in the neighbor’s lot onto our concrete and into our pool. I put him into a shoebox and took him over to my parents as Mamina has mended many a broken wing and is quite the expert. After letting him dry off and calm down, I realized nothing was visibly broken, and actually he was quite spritely, hopping about, chirping and opening his mouth wide open everytime we neared him in hopes of scoring some food. His baby down-covered wings were in fine working order as were his claws. At this point, we tried to think of something to feed him, none of us were too thrilled to go into the garden to dig up worms-ew! So we thought, what could have more protein than eggs. We took some leftover omelet, squished it with some water, and fed it to him with a medicine dropper. (I know it’s kind of strange to feed a bird eggs, but hey, we didn't hink he could digest milk!)

He seemed to be doing fine and I was all excited at the prospect of training him to fly (we’d actually achieved in teaching two baby blue jays to fly when the same thing happened when I was a teen.) After our father’s day brunch, we took him back home in my mom’s cat carrier (now filling in as a cage). We surely couldn’t leave him in the shoebox as he was hopping around so much I was scared he would jump out of the box and back into the pool, let alone that he could be exposed to outside predators, so the cage was safest. We placed his little cage in our back yard, and lo and behold after a little while, his parents found him. They kept swooping down and landing on this cage, checking him out. One of the parents would scan for danger while the other fetched nice big juicy worms to feed her child through the bars. When either Pacino or I went outside near the cage, they would follow us like hawks, circling our house and making sure their baby was safe. It was incredible to see the parental instinct of these birds. Needless to say, we watched this amazing family in action until the sun set. At this point, I noticed the mother was getting really antsy, she kept circling the cage on foot like a sentry guard, she was panicky, she kept peeking into the cage and hopping erratically, up, down, circle the cage, flying back and forth, she was really agitated. You could see that she was trying to get into the cage and be with her baby. After doing this for over an hour, she flew off to watch from afar. I went outside to try to leave the door of the cage slightly ajar, just enough for the mother to be able to touch her offspring, but not enough for the baby to fall out, but I noticed that she didn’t come back. Later in the evening, after the sun set, I went out to check on him and he was sleeping, so I covered the top of the cage with a towel to keep it warm overnight. I named him Ziggy.

This morning, Pacino woke up first to get ready for work, and he woke me up with the very sad news that Ziggy was no more. I went down to check him out and after picking up his little cold, stiff body to examine it, I realized what I had suspected but hoped wasn’t true. The juicy moisture around his ears was not pool water, but was blood that had crusted over....internal bleeding is what I figured. No matter how good a shape he was in outwardly, showing sings of energy and vigor, the trauma on the inside (probably a head injury) was not something that could have been easily detected. In hindsight, I think the mother realized her baby was in trouble which was why she was so agitated at the end of the previous day. I was really sad, letting go of a few tears. I just couldn’t put him in the garbage, so I dug a little hole in the flower bed near the tree he fell out of, and buried him near his home. It’s funny how throughout the night, I slept in a semi-state of consciousness, stirring once in a while and thinking, is he cold, is he scared? Maybe I had a premonition...who knows.

I learned one thing. Parental instinct and the will to survive are present in even the smallest of creatures. Their little family was so fascinating and heartening to watch. Birdbrains, my ass!

Goodbye Ziggy. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.

Come Together

-Beatles

Wow, two posts in one day! I just wanted to introduce some new links. I like to support my friends, so I'm linking their blogs to mine. The Dubai Chronicles are the articles/stories and musings of a friend of mine that left Montreal a few years ago to brave the political storms of the Middle East. She always was a vivacious (shy yet paradoxically chatty) fashionista, but no one could have guessed that the little skinny girl with the long (and I mean long!) hair would one day become a globetrotting journalist. She is an interesting read so I hope you check out her site.

Life on the Other Side of The Pond is a new blog that another friend just started. She is also an old friend from Montreal. She moved to Toronto a few years back, and since then, the travel bug bit her and she's become mighty adventurous, living and traveling across Australia all of last year while swimming with sharks and parachuting. Now she's decided to settle down and see if life in the UK is more to her liking so she'll be documenting her adventures or mis-adventures as she calls them.

I enjoy keeping track of my buddies through blogs, so please people, if you start one up let me know and I'll link up. Scarbiedoll (Martinis for Milk) started it all as she introduced me to the Blog last year when she started her own hilarious documented journey towards motherhood.

And Femail Advice is now going down that same mommy road. We grew up together as neighbors and over the years she moved on (also to Toronto!) and now her husband has been transferred to Mexico so she's keeping us abreast of her new life South of the Border.

Keep up the good work girls. Keep writing and giving me a good laugh (or sometimes a sobering thought to dwell on). New blogs are welcome!

Money, Money, Money

Money, money, money
Must be funny
In the rich man’s world
- ABBA

After a week of paint hell which consisted of Al and I sacrificing our vacation-time to complete all the main floor, we thought it would be nice to relax on Saturday night and go grab a flick with a couple of friends. Now mind you, there was a time when we were at the movies twice a week, but that was B.M. (before marriage). Now that we have our own little home theater, who needs to go out to see a film, so lately we’ve been cinema slackers.....which would explain the sticker shock I felt and hence the reason why I’m writing today about which purchased items and services totally make me feel like I’m being ripped off of my hard-earned moolah.

Lately, it seems the only time we ever catch a movie is after a meal, in which case we are so full we never get around to buying snacks. Also, Pacino DID get a crazy allergic rash 4 years ago after eating buttered movie popcorn (At a specific theater chain only. Apparently he wasn’t the first, something in the fake butter triggered it). So since that fiasco, we’ve steered clear of the movie popcorn. But on Sat night, we were feeling reckless and tired and hungry (blame it on the paint fumes) and we bought ourselves a large popcorn and a soda....(now keep in mind that I haven’t purchased these items at the movies in ages)...WOW, I paid a whopping $10.50 for one popcorn and regular sized, watered down fountain soda. Talk about feeling ripped off! How can anyone justify paying ten bucks for stuff that costs pennies, I tell ya’. Needless to say, I savored each and every kernel like it was the finest Russian caviar.

On to other things that make me feel ripped off......Greeting cards!!! What’s with that. Why in the world does it cost me $5+ tax for a card? For mother’s day, I spent 20 bucks buying cards for all the "moms" in my life. It’s one single sheet of carton paper with 3 lines of writing, a cartoon, some sparklies and an envelope for crying out loud.

Another favorite of mine are pantyhose.....Now come one, people! Plastic and nylon are pretty much the cheapest things out there. Why in the world must we pay $9 for pantyhose which rip as soon as you remove the packaging! I don’t get it, we don’t live in World War era when women rationed pantyhose and nylon was so expensive that they used to draw a line at the back of their calves with eye liner.. Any other item in the world that’s defective you can return. But why must we continue to purchase an extremely flawed product, then gingerly slink our way into the hose making sure no jagged nail, no lingering leg hair or anything sharper than a cotton ball stands in the way of the hose as we inch it upwards. Even after all our efforts, there will always be some stupid thing that will snag onto our hose during the day and make sure to ruin them. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to pay 9$ and wear it one full day. I never could relate to those movies where you see single women putting on makeup in their bathroom with freshly washed pantyhose strewn over the towel rails to dry...mine never make it to the washing stage. As a result, I have forsaken pantyhose for the last few years, deciding to go au naturel.

My last rant will be - not about a product, but a service....mainly a little something called coatcheck. This pet peeve of mine lingers from my clubbing days where we would wait outside in a line-up in front of a club, in minus 30 degree weather, for over an HOUR to get in, only to pay 3$ for coatcheck. Now don’t get me wrong, three bucks is not the end of the world BUT, why should we be forced to pay for something that is a necessity (like paying to use the toilet if you ask me). We NEED our coats in the winter, and the club management FORCES you to check in your coat, and yet they charge you for it (not very nice treatment towards a client who wants to pay you patronage if you ask me) AND they maintain that they will not be held responsible for any lost or stolen items....like the time my friend’s brand new leather jacket was conveniently misplaced. Let me get this straight...you force me to check in my coat, you make me pay for it (besides the cover charge and the drinks that I’m paying for) and then you "lose" my stuff and won’t be held responsible for it?? Why shouldn’t they be held responsible, they’re the only ones to have access to the coats....Grrr.

There are a million other examples of things that make me feel cheated...but I don’t have all day, so gotta run....now that’ll be $10 for reading my blog. I only take cash.