I cleaned my purse out today. It had been getting heavier and heavier, and I was quite curious as to what was in there.

Some highlights:

• vast quantities of paper napkins (only some of which were used)
• Chinese restaurant flyer
• pirate eye patch
• pirate map
• plastic telescope
• plastic shark
• yoga studio brochure
• Ontario Science Centre flyer
• four lip glosses
• Licemeister™ lice comb

I've been doing a lot of work-work lately, and not finding time for life maintainance. The state of my purse, before I cleaned it out, was much like the state of my wallet, and the state of my desk, and the state of my yard, and indeed the state of my house. When that much of your life is in disarray it makes you feel like a bit of a failure. I was really glad to get a chance to clean out my purse, and I hope I can get to some of that other stuff soon.

Christmas this year started a little earlier than usual with the screening of Tafelmusik's Sing-Along Messiah documentary in mid-November. They screened it at a theatre nearby, and I was invited because I'm friends with one of their marketing people. I invited Kat and Tanya as my plus-one, and we had a lovely evening out.

More Messiah ensued a couple of weeks later with my choir's performance thereof, which went fantastically well. We've done Messiah so many times I think people are actually starting to relax and enjoy singing it.

Our first Christmas party was at a friend of the family's. I'm sure he'd like to stop inviting us because we never talk to anyone we're not related to, and we eat like crazy, but we always enjoy ourselves.

Around mid-December I went to a free choir and organ concert at Roy Thomson Hall, with the Elmer Iseler Singers. Another good concert, and they had a couple of sing-along numbers. One of the sing-alongs was the Hallelujah chorus, but I was the only person in my area who sang along with any enthusiasm — it's a bit of a funny choice for a sing-along, really. I belted it out anyway.

That week was the last week of school, so we were invited to Cordelia's class party, and I went to the school Holiday Sing-Along assembly. Then on that weekend I went to a free concert at Yorkminster in aid of CHUM Christmas Wish — admission was free but they asked for a donation of a toy. It was a fantastic lineup: True North Brass, High Park Children's Choirs, Richard Margison and Isabel Bayrakdarian. For free! I went for Isabel Bayrakdarian (and the sing-along Christmas carols), but she gave a rather predictable performance of Oh Holy Night. Richard Margison sang some vaguely familiar Disney-esque duet with his pop-singing daughter Lauren, but then she left the stage and he treated us to a toe-curling rendition of Nessun Dorma. I admit I've never really been into opera, but this particular performance reached all the way up to the balcony and grabbed me. I couldn't stay for the whole concert, but I believe I was there for the best bit.

I had to leave early because we were on our way to a party at our old/new friends the Theysmeyers'. It was terrific to meet their neighbours but best was reconnecting with old friends from university, some who I hadn't seen since well before Delphine was born. Delphine and Cordelia had a great time as the senior kids at the party — the host's kid is four and everyone else was that age or younger, so my girls took charge.

Thursday night we had some people over to eat cookies and sing some more carols, and then Friday (Christmas Eve) we had nothing to do — the house was clean, the fridge was full of party food. (I actually got some work done.) Later in the day David Wolever came over for a quick visit and dropped off an Arduino for Blake and a clickety IBM Model M keyboard (with USB converter cable!) for me. So awesome! So we fed him cookies.

And today was Christmas. Delphine was sick last night and stumbled out of her room at 10 pm all miserable and damp and sore. I fed her some ibuprofen and tucked her back in, but not before she noticed her stocking was full. I feigned ignorance. Maybe Santa came in through the bathroom exhaust vent?

Delphine being sick meant that she didn't wake up at the crack of dawn to open her stocking, so at around 7:00 I and the girls went downstairs and the girls investigated their stockings while I experimented with making cinnamon buns with biscuit dough. (Hypothesis: yum! Result: hypothesis confirmed!) We ate, then everyone got dressed before we dug into the presents.

Blake was very happy with The Calculus Diaries by Jennifer Ouellette, a iPhone holder for working out with, and a Cybertool Swiss Army knife with about a billion tools which will be very useful when he's messing with his new Arduino.

I got a ceramic figurine of a little girl standing by a bucket — the bucket doubles as a candle holder — from Delphine, and an iHome alarm clock from Blake, as well as some chocolate, earrings and stationery (-ary?) from my cousin, who always buys me unambitious but excellent gifts.

The girls loved their Playmobil, Quadrilla marble run, books, playdough (for Cordelia) and colour-in-able purse (for Delphine). Delphine was pretty happy to spend the day convalescing on the couch and reading her new Magic Tree House books from Cordelia.

We had all the usual suspects for Christmas Dinner, as well as Auntie J'Anne and a co-worker of Morgan's who needed a loaner family for Christmas. She fit right in. Our very special guest this year was baby Charlie, who was celebrating (but not really enjoying) his first Christmas.

Dinner was pretty good. I did two roasts (I have to ask them to leave the prime rib in one piece the next time we order cow), roasted potatoes, and Yorkshire puddings, and Morgan brought salad. (Baba brought wine and appetizers.) The beef was fine, the potatoes were okay but not crispy, and the Yorkshires were fine. Part of the problem was that there were no drippings from the beef, so we had to do the potatoes and Yorkies with canola oil, which I think we didn't heat up enough. Still, it was well-received. The Christmas pudding with brandy butter and whipped cream seemed to go down pretty smooth too, but just in case, we served a giant Toblerone and a gingerbread house as well.

For after dinner entertainment we tried to teach Morgan's friend how to do cryptic crosswords, and I made everyone play "Twinkle Twinkle" on the pitched whistles from our Christmas crackers. (Everyone got a numbered note, and I yelled out each person's number: "1 1! 5 5! 6 6! 5! 4 4! 3 3! 2 2! 1! 5 5! 4 4! 3 3! 2 2! 5 5!..." and so on.) $25 well spent, I believe.

Then we all sat around and digested and played with the children's toys until it was (their) bedtime. Now that everyone else has either gone home or is tucked in, Blake is watching a video about dragons and I'm drinking sherry and listening to Christmas music. A fantastic day all 'round (unless you're Delphine).

Just because I can (i.e., am technically competent to) do something doesn't mean I can (i.e., have time to) do it.

Just because something should be done doesn't mean it should be me who does it.

Just because something would be fun doesn't mean I have time for it.

Here's a story from my mother.

She used to be in the Stoke-on-Trent Choral Society, and one year they did Bach's St Matthew Passion. There was a doctor on staff at the hospital (North Staffs Infirmary? – I have a very vague idea of the timelines of my mother's pre-me life) nicknamed "Deadly Earnest" who loved Bach – that might have been all he ever listened to. (He was from Leeds, my mother's from North Staffordshire, so you'll have to imagine the accents if you know them.) So she said to him,

"Are you going to come out and hear the St Matthew Passion, then?"

"Oh, I dunno. You'll prob'ly muck it up."

"Oh, go on!"

So he did come out and hear it, and afterwards she asked what he thought.

"Wunt bad."

High praise indeed.

I know that's not a funny story or anything. But my mother tells millions of these little, pointless but telling slice-of-life stories (most of them for the fourth or fifth time) and I've just been letting them wash over me all my life. But it's starting to set in that, like fossil fuels, my mother's stories are a non-renewable resource and I had better start saving them.

Thomas is our cat. We got him – can it be? – in 1999. He was four then, so some rudimentary arithmetic suggests that he's 15 years old, which is about a hundred and fifty in cat years. Or people years – however that works. Anyway, he's old.

He's starting to show his age, in a variety of ways. He's very, very thin, and his fur is dull. He smells a bit peculiar. He has become strangely affectionate; he'll hang around when you're in the kitchen, stretching up and wrapping his arms around your legs. He also comes around when we're eating and reaches up to gently paw Delphine or I on the side. Today I picked him up and he settled uncomfortably on my lap for a few minutes – he wants to be near us but he's not sure how to enjoy it when it happens. He's never been a lap cat before.

At fifteen years, and so obviously fading, we know Thomas isn't going to be with us for long. I don't know how he's going to go. I suppose he'll get more and more infirm until he can't manage any more and we take him to the vet to have some of that alarmingly purple liquid injected into him. Or maybe we'll just come downstairs one morning and he'll be dead. I just hope it isn't messy or painful.

I totally forgot to do a blog post yesterday. I was aiming for one every day through September. I don't think anyone noticed though...

Yesterday was a full day – full of what, I'm not exactly sure. No one big thing.

I've been having trouble cramming enough work hours into my days day, so yesterday I was determined to devote most of my kid-free six hours to working, to catch up on my hours for this week. But then I realized I had to go grocery shopping after I dropped the girls off at school. Then I put away the groceries and by then it was past ten. Then I worked, had lunch, worked some more, did email and some chores because my eyes were crossing, worked some more and it was time to pick up the girls. Then they played while I puttered, or sorted through the vast piles of paperwork they come home with this time of year. At five I made dinner, at six we ate, then I put Cordelia to bed, then Delphine, then went out for a walk at eight. I got home at nine, filled in the paperwork, paid bills, and went to bed.

In the midst of all that I worked for two hours and 35 minutes. That's twenty-five minutes short of the three hours a day I would like to work, that on a day I had intended to work tons and catch up. I'm having more trouble than I thought I would squeezing three work hours from the day. And it's not screwing around, either, I swear. I spend maybe twenty minutes on Twitter, and I don't read blogs at all.

No, it's all the other stuff: housework, errands, School Council stuff, social stuff, and the endless administration of being a parent of middle-class 21st-century school-age children: forms to fill out, activities to research and sign up for, birthday parties to plan, and on and on. Hopefully it will taper off now that the initial rush of forms and signups is done.

And I will have to work on outsourcing, downsizing, postponing and streamlining, so I can fit in that three hours of work, else I can't even pay for Cordelia's daycare.

Now that I have a walking-around camera (ie, the camera in my phone) I don't have to look at random plants and say, "hey, that's cool, I wonder what it is." I can take pictures and post them here and ask everyone!

So what is this stuff with the little round pink and orange flower heads?

How about this red flower with big leaves?

I've seen this squashy-looking thing with white trumpet-shaped flowers all over the place:

I also like this grass with flat seedheads:

Here it is with Cordelia:

Tomorrow's the start of the new year. No, not Rosh Hashanah (that's Wednesday), although Shana Tova to those of you who are into that kind of thing. No, tomorrow is the first day of school.

For Cordelia that means Senior Kindergarten with a new teacher and a whole new batch of friends. Kindergarten in Ontario is arranged as a two-year deal, and class groupings generally stay the same—which is to say all the JKs stay together when they move up to SK. However, Cordelia is so advanced (or more likely so used to hanging out with older kids) that all her friends last year were in SK. So they're all happily off to Grade One and she doesn't have any friends in her class yet. However, I'm sure she'll work something out.

When I asked her at dinner, she said she was most excited about meeting her new teacher. When I asked her what she was most scared about she said, "There's nothing scary about school!"

Cordelia's other new big thing is that she's starting daycare. I'm thrilled that she's in daycare, not just because it means I can have six uninterrupted hours to myself five days a week (although I am nearly light-headed at the thought), but because I love the activities, I love the structure, and I love the fact that she'll get a healthy lunch and snacks. Frankly if she were home with me she'd be playing video games while I fold laundry or nap on the couch—at daycare she'll be doing music and crafts and all kinds of wonderful things. Cordelia's also excited about daycare. They have "pretty good centres", she says.

For Delphine, the start of school means Grade Two in a new classroom in the basement, as part of a Grade Two/Three combined class. Her teacher is someone I've met briefly and really liked, and she is in the same class as her best friend. She's more than ready to go back to school—she and Cordelia have been needling each other for the last week.

I can't remember what Delphine was most excited about, but she's scared there will be spiders in the classroom because they were using it as a storeroom before. I said they'd probably clean it before the first day of school.

For me this is also a time of great change. I'm starting work in earnest now that I have those six uninterrupted hours five days a week. I'm working on a publishing project at the moment, then after that I have another editing gig lined up (I was just offered it the day before yesterday—whoo!)

I'm looking forward to working, but at dinner I said the thing I was scared about was that I wouldn't have time to work and do all the other things I do: volunteer with the school, do housework and household maintenance, exercise (I want to start training for a walking ½-marathon), reading. I said I'm worried I will let someone down or mess something up or find I don't have time for something.

But really, I'm not all that worried. Since having children I've become way more efficient, and six hours is really a lot. Six hours is a lot for one day; I literally can't imagine six hours to myself for five days in a row. Let alone for five days in a row for forty-two weeks! I'll be swimming in time! I could rebuild Rome!

Blake says he isn't scared about anything.

I posted new pictures from our trip to Saskatchewan and the rest of summer.

Delphine's birthday party, or How To Throw The World's Best Party.

I was once again lured by the siren song of Flick'r, and posted pictures from December, January to April, and Ursa's birthday party there. I thought it would be easier than posting on the local page, but in the end I got tired of editing and saving all the caption text, picture by picture. Next time I'll go back to posting pictures on the local page.

Blake and I went for a bike ride today while the girls were out swimming with Baba and Zaida. I didn't really want to go, but Blake does so love to ride his bike, and I don't mind biking. So off we went, and went up some steepish hills and down a slightly scary one, found some nice nature to bring Delphine to, and lost contact with my butt. And that was, as they say, all well and good, but the interesting thing happened later.

I felt great.

My back didn't hurt, my foot didn't hurt (I've had plantar fasciitis for, like, months), and I had enough energy to run up and down the sidewalk flying a kite with Cordelia. I didn't realize how bad I'd been feeling lately until I stopped feeling bad, and clearly part of the problem is the utter lack of aerobic exercise I've been doing lately. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to do about that...

Cordelia and I fought today. Not the screamy angry kind of fighting, but silly punching kicking fighting. She was hitting me as hard as she could, and of course I was just play hitting. It's never come up before, so I have no idea of the etiquette of playfighting. I suppose it's not done to playfight at all any more, but she's just so cute when she snarls at me with her perfectly straight tiny teeth, and thumps me with her tiny ineffectual fists. It's like being menaced by a chinchilla.

We watched Prince of Egypt today, admittedly a week late for Passover. I had forgotten how great that movie is. We bought it, so we can watch it as often as we like. Every Passover! We don't do anything else for Passover, apart from eat a lot at Baba's house, so why not create our own traditions?

I used to have a blog here, but lately I've been busy with this paying job thing and haven't been blogging much. I have about eighteen million books to blog about, and everything else. This is going to be the everything else post.

Delphine

Delphine is nearly seven and she's become all happy and patient and agreeable. Well, not all, but more than before. She sometimes doesn't respond when Cordelia tries to fight with her; she sometimes goes along with me when I ask her to do stuff she doesn't want to; she is usually happy after school and she seldom complains about her day. She's no Pollyanna, but she's not quite as emo and gloomy as she has been through most of the last year.

Delphine had her first piano lesson last Saturday. Piano lessons now are so much cooler than when I started playing: instead of starting with "this is a staff and this is a quarter note" it starts with "these are your fingers and this is the keyboard" and you plunk away, and notation is introduced as needed and no sooner.

So Delphine loves piano. She couldn't wait to get home to practice, and she has practiced every day this week.

Cordelia

Cordelia is still happy, sweet Cordelia. She tells me she loves me eighteen million times a day and she does little dances. She loves her friends, too—she and Anna won't go into the kindergarten playground without the other.

I wonder, sometimes, if Cordelia's always going to be the sweet, frivolous contrast to Delphine's darker personality. No, that's not quite right. What I wonder is how Cordelia's bubbliness will make the transition to adulthood. Where is she going to get that gravity that surely adulthood demands?

For now it seems like along with gloominess, Delphine also has a lock on scepticism, bookishness, and intellectualism (inasmuch as a six-year-old can be intellectual). Cordelia's only "things" are that she runs really fast (and a lot) and sings well. I guess I worry that Delphine's going to be "the clever one", leaving some other identity for Cordelia. I suppose even if she isn't "the clever one" she'll still be clever and she can always leverage that in whatever she ends up doing with herself.

Anyway, there's nothing so sure as that they'll be what they'll be and I have much less control over what they'll be than I'd like to think.

Me

As for me, I have got myself a paying job. I'm copyediting and laying out a non-fiction book for self-publishing. A while ago I said that I didn't think copyediting would be a great job for me because it's so picky-picky; as it turns out it's a lot more fun than I thought it would be. I do love to proofread things, and even the totally anal stuff is kind of cool. I like knowing what kind of dash to use (even if I don't always bother to use the right one) and whether "BCE" has periods or not. And the meticulousness you need to employ to keep track of the style decisions you've made is right up my list-making alley.

I do need to reread Strunk and White, and some other writing books, just to clarify what makes good writing good, and I feel like I should put my hands on some style guides. (I wonder if people buy those on paper or just, I dunno, subscribe to them online or something.)

This working gig is going to have to get a lot more real in September. I signed Cordelia up for daycare when she was just over a year old, and as it turns out she got in. She starts in September at the daycare at the school. I won't have Delphine in daycare ("It's not FAIR!") but I will send her to school with a lunch, so my work day will be from 9:00 until 3:00. My plan, such that it is, is to work a twenty-hour week, leaving me ten hours a week for such frivolity as housework, exercise, reading and getting my nails done. Maybe I'll skip the nails and read more.

I'm reading a rather intense (but very useful) book about starting a home-based writing business. The author is quite intent on my making a business plan, planning further education, budgeting, marketing, and all that sensible, grown-up stuff. I almost feel like I can't waste my time doing that stuff when I could be doing billable work—kind of like the kid who runs his bike all the way to school because he doesn't have time to get on. I'm also resisting doing all that business stuff because somehow I can't take myself that seriously as a professional freelance writer and copyeditor. Clearly I'm going to have to get over that, but fortunately I have a few months to do it.

Back in November I talked about those women who do a million and one things—have a career, have a nice house, do charity work, volunteer at school—and how I'm going to be more like them. So far it's going pretty well—I helped with a fundraiser at school, I'm chair of a somewhat underachieving Eco-committee (part of the problem being that whenever we think of something eco to do it turns out the school is already doing it), and so far my children haven't starved to death or sickened due to the filthy state of the house. One thing did falter: I missed a few notes in the Christmas concert because I wasn't at the dress rehearsal. Lesson learned.

But I digress. The reason I bring this up is that I realized that this ambition, to Do Lots of Things, is a subset of a bigger ambition which I have just put into words: Be More Awesome.

As I have discussed before, I see myself as a veritable well of unfulfilled potential. Sure, I have a rather lame math degree and two lovely children, but other people my age are running for city councillor and writing books and,well, being awesome. I want at least a little piece of that.

Let me digress again for a moment. The school is getting a second kindergarten playground, and the eco-committee wants it to be a natural playground, one of those jobbies with logs and rocks to play on instead of metal and plastic playstructures. Great idea, very eco. We (mostly I) came up with this idea ages ago, but I wasn't sure where to start, who to talk to, how to broach the subject. So I didn't do anything.

And then last week I busted up my back (You know why? Because in my last post I was all "I haven't hurt my back for over a year!" Stupid.) and I was stuck on the couch all week. Rather than be completely useless I did some research on natural playgrounds and then I emailed the principal. I was all, "The eco-committee is exploring the idea of a natural playground for the new kindergarten playground", and I went on to briefly describe a natural playground, and explain why we (I) thought it would be a good idea. I cc'd the vice-principal, our trustee, and the rest of the committee, and hit send.

Three minutes later the trustee replied saying he would be happy to attend a meeting about this proposal. Proposal! It was just an idea, a whim! But by writing it down and sending it to some people, it became a proposal. Thirty minutes later the principal responded with a five-paragraph email, cc'd to about a billion more people, saying that they had considered a natural playground, we should meet soon and what was my thinking? We're meeting on Tuesday.

That's it. That's all it took: an idea, some Googling and a judiciously cc'd email, and now we have a proposal and a meeting. Obviously I'm going to have to prepare for the meeting, and there will be other jobs coming down the pipeline, but all it took to get the ball rolling was one email message.

What I have learned from this is that the path to awesomeness is paved with tiny baby steps. This a truth neither profound nor abstruse, but it has been a long time coming to me. I don't like to act on things unless I know how they're going to turn out. And not just the first step, I like to know what's going to happen four or five steps down the line. I like to think things through and anticipate problems, and prepare for them. This is a wonderful trait if you're going camping, or taking two small people downtown, or going on vacation, but it has its limits. When I'm contemplating something complicated or new, or that involves other people, I can can always think of nine or ten ways stuff could go horribly wrong. Thus, paralysis. Inaction. Failure to be awesome.

A while ago I read a book called Feel the Fear... And Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers and as you can see from my discussion of it, a) this blog post is well overdue and b) I am a broken record. The good news is that I've taken the lessons I learned from the book on board—the ideas that were new to me back in 2008 are a comfortable part of my daily coping repertoire now. So, odd as it seems, these realizations, that I am scared to act if I don't know I will succeed, and that it only takes a small step to start getting things done, actually represent progress in my quest to be more awesome.

I got a great email newsletter from David Allen (of Getting Things Done fame) about taking stock of the year's accomplishments and completions. He included a list of categories to focus on, which I am going to use to consider how 2009 was for me and what I'm going to change in 2010.

Physical

After a c-section in 2003, another in 2005 and gallbladder removal in 2007, 2009 was refreshingly free of major or minor surgery. I don't think I had a single episode of major back pain, either, so maybe I have finally figured out how to deal with that (mainly stretching, and strategic use of ab muscles). I did some running after school started in September, but a bout of H1N1 in November sapped my motivation and I haven't run since.

I recently went to the doctor for my irregularly scheduled annual checkup and everything checked up fine, but I have gained twenty pounds I wasn't entirely expecting. (I don't weigh myself at home so the pounds have lots of time to creep on between doctor visits.) I will be addressing that situation in the new year, along with everyone else in North America. I've been very self-indulgent with my eating habits lately—I need to be more sensible about that, and I'm going to switch from running to walking in the hopes that I can slip it into my daily routine easier. I also think that doing yoga regularly would cure most of my mechanical problems.

Emotional

I have to admit this has been a difficult year for me, emotionally. I have been pretty unhappy about a couple of things—doing all the housework myself, for example—and have felt almost entirely alone with that unhappiness. Blake and I are rubbish at confrontation so I tend to never try and resolve problems with him. And they fester. As if that's not bad enough, I don't have an extra-marital emotional support system to listen and offer support and suggestions. I used to have my brother, then I had Sascha and my BF-as-it-turns-out-not-F Janet. My brother and Sascha got lives and Janet dumped me, and then Delphine was born, and I guess I haven't had any real emo needs since then, until this year. This year has been very emo but I've mainly dealt with it on my own, mostly in the basement while folding laundry. That sucks. Kat is a good ear, but I can't drop everything and cry on the phone to her whenever I'm unhappy. The laundry needs folding and she has a job.

Obviously in 2010 I have to do that a little better. What do I do? Make a new friend? One without a job or any children? Get a therapist? Start a private journal? Go to a marriage counsellor? I will have to figure something out.

Mental

Mentally I think I have held my ground this year. As I mentioned in my book blog, this year hasn't been terrifically intellectually rigorous, but I read a few thinky books and I've been keeping up with my Walruses and New Scientists. I'm happy and excited with my decision to pursue writing as a career. I love to read and think and write, and if I can possibly make some kind of money at it that would be awesome.

Next year, obviously, I have to kick the writing into a higher gear. It's very hard to get anything done in the two hours that Cordelia is at school, so I have to figure out how to focus my efforts in that time (less twitting and housework, more actual writing). I have both girls on a list for daycare starting in September, but of course paying for daycare demands that I earn an income. This is more terrifying to me than perhaps it should be.

Spiritual

I think I'm in the same place spiritually that I was a year ago. I don't think about it much. I don't believe in the supernatural but I derive a feeling of wonder from the immensity of the universe, from the magical unlikeliness of our existence, from my children. I try to be good. In 2010, more of the same.

Financial

We paid off our line of credit! Of course, Blake was on contract and he didn't pay taxes all year, so come April we may be in debt again, but for now we are debt-free. Hopefully a year from now we will be debt-free for sure.

Family

My family is awesome. The girls are going through an utterly charming patch, and I'm happy with our parenting. I haven't yelled in ages! Next year, I hope that will continue. Five and seven are both supposed to be pretty charming ages, so that looks good.

Further afield, I would like to be closer to my brother. He just moved in with a girl who I know next to nothing about, and I have no idea what's going on with him generally. I should also call my mother more often. So should you, probably.

Community Service

Before this year I wouldn't have had a lot to say in this category, but this year I did a ton of work for my kids' school, and did it ever open my eyes to the amount of free labour the school boards of Canada get from parents. I worked in the library, volunteered in the classroom, helped run a craft room for a fundraiser, went on a field trip, was class parent for Delphine's class, and signed up to head the Eco-committee.

This year I hope to actually do something as head of the Eco-committee, and I'm going to try and pursuade our School Council to donate some money to a school without so many deep-pocketed parents. I suppose I'll be roped into running the craft room again next Christmas, too.

Fun / creativity / recreation

You know, I've been thinking about fun lately, specifically in the context of play. The children play most of the time and work hardly at all—Delphine works a little bit at school, and she has a couple of jobs at home, but most of her time is free time. Cordelia is four—she plays at school and she plays at home, and her only job is feeding the cat.

But when do I play? On the one hand I'm in the very lucky position of rarely having to do something which I'm not intrinsically motivated to do. I look after the children because I love them, I take care of the house because I want my house to be taken care of. I read and write because I love to do so, I have fun volunteering for the school. There is almost nothing I do that's pure drudgery. And a lot of what I do is pure fun: most of my reading, choir, my friendships, and watching TV are all things I do for myself.

In 2010 I would like to read more, and keep singing and seeing my friends. I'm even happy with the amount of TV I watch, or rather with the quality of TV I watch. I should try and use my time more mindfully, so I don't fritter it away. I have too much fun stuff to do to spend time doing things which are merely diverting.

That's that. It's 12:21 am on January 1. I hope everyone has a wonderful year in 2010!

(By the way, you can subscribe to David Allen's Productive Living newsletter here. I've only received one, so I don't know how good they generally are, but since I used the latest one to inspire this post I figure I should at least point you to the source. I do use the Getting Things Done system and find it very effective and comprehensive.)

I'd like you to meet Max. Max is my new Macbook. New to me—he's actually refurbished. He's the first computer I've had to myself since I was in high school. Max has a 2.13 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and 2 GB of RAM. He's running Snow Leopard, and he's fast. Max doesn't make me wait for anything.

I called him Max because all our computers have people names, and because he's all white, like Max in Where The Wild Things Are.

Max is my work computer. I couldn't get anything done with the old laptop I was using because it was basically too slow to load any web pages, so I asked Blake to lend me $1000 of "our" money. I said I would pay it back. This agreement makes me uncomfortable and slightly unhappy, but I suppose that's a conversation to have with Blake. And at least I got Max out of it.

Today the girls and I went for our H1N1 shots. The shots have been available for a few weeks now, so the big lineups have waned and we only had to wait for a few minutes to register. The girls were both pretty chipper about getting their shots, but I was a little nervous. Most of the people I've talked to about it said it hurt like crazy and kept hurting for days. The nurse said I should go first because the girls would cry, but I was all, "My kids won't cry! You don't know my kids!"

Delphine kept assuring me it wouldn't hurt, and indeed, despite my fears, the injection hardly hurt at all. It's a little achy now (four hours later) but nothing like I expected. (I wonder if that's because I had what I suspect was H1N1 last week?)

Then it was Delphine's turn. The nurse had me hold her legs between my legs and pin down her arm, which seemed excessive. The needle went in and Delphine started to cry. "That hurt!" She kept crying for a little while, just enough time to worry Cordelia, then she pulled herself together and it was Cordelia's turn.

Cordelia came up on my knee without hesitation, took off her shirt and made a show of leaving it stuck on her head like hair, but when the time came for me to hold her still she freaked out. I really did have to clamp her down and she still managed a little wiggle while the needle was in her. Then she had a good howl, no doubt freaking out all the other kids in the room. She got a band-aid ("Band-aid!", she sobbed) and then settled down.

Since the shot, Delphine has been fine and Cordelia has been a little whiny. She had mostly forgotten about the shot until she changed into her pajamas and seeing the bandaid reminded her, so she affected a Quasimodo lurch and moaned, "When I put clothes over my flu shot it hurts!" Awww. Then I let her brush her own teeth and she forgot about it again.

Tomorrow Blake's going to get the shot, and we will have a 100% household herd immunity rate. Hooray! And then just two months until seasonal flu shots.

New pictures up featuring the deck party, Cordelia's birthday, and Hallowe'en.

I've always wondered how they do it, those women. You know the ones, the women who are on the board of this organization and the fundraising committee of that, who have two children and a dog and a full-time job. The women who do it all. How?

For example, the president of our School Council (PTA to you) is a full-time lawyer, and she has two little kids. How does she manage? Where does she find the time? So I asked her. I did, I just asked her. And for one thing, she doesn't clean. She has a giant house and she gets someone in every weekend to clean. That's a whole day of cleaning, probably $200 a week or so. Of course she has childcare: she has a nice young woman who looks after the kids and probably does light housekeeping too. I don't know what else she doesn't do, but she's not averse to spending money so I bet she pays people to do quite a lot of mundane crap. I know I would if I could manage it.

I know dozens of these women with full-time jobs and children who none-the-less manage to take on huge volunteer roles in the school, or in other organizations. They don't all have money, so it can't be that they all outsource all that time-consuming everyday crap. And yet here I am, with my two kids and not much else on my plate, barely making it through each day. Why? There's nothing in particular wrong with me, that I know of. What do these other women have that I lack? Time? Ambition? Passion? Amphetamines?

Finally I decided that rather than try and work this out deductively I would just run an experiment. I would go ahead and sign myself up for a bunch of stuff and see what broke.

So this year, I'm chair of the school's Eco-Committee. (So far we've had one meeting, submitted a grant proposal, and sent a lot of email.) I'm working on the Crafts booth for our school Winter Fair. I'm class parent for Delphine's class, I help out in the library for two hours every two weeks, and I get to school at 8 am on Thursdays to help with Junior Choir. I run twice a week. I have choir, and book club, and that whole "writing career" thing I said I would get started on. I still have two children and a cat to look after, and a house to run. Oh, and I have friends who sometimes I like to hang out with, and a husband who, frankly, I barely ever talk to about anything other than household administrivia. And I like to watch TV. And read—a lot. And there's this blog. And the eight hours of sleep that I really, really enjoy.

Under all that weight, something's bound to break. Perhaps it will be sleep. Perhaps it will be housework. Perhaps it will be one of my new responsibilities. Perhaps it will be my mental health. Or perhaps it will turn out that I'm one of those women who can do it all. Perhaps all I needed to do was try.

I am like my dad—the older I get the more I see it. When I was a kid I thought I didn't have a sense of humour, because I didn't laugh at the same things my mum laughs at. It took me a long time to realize that my sense of humour is sarcastic and ironic, like my dad's. (My mum always said my dad didn't have a sense of humour, either.) I'm like him in other ways, too: we shared a love of singing, of writing. We shared our insecurity, our sociability, our interest in politics and civic engagement.

Despite our similarities, we never had a great relationship. My parents had an awkward marriage, and since I was closer to my mother, my childhood relationship with my father was strained by my knowledge of the hurt he caused her. After I left home, that distance persisted, even when we travelled together. There were glimmers of the connection we could have had. Occasionally we would get talking about politics or people, I would make a joke or sarcastic comment and the phone line would crackle with his rare laughter, stiff with disuse. But soon we would run out of things to say and the moment would pass. I never knew how to conjure up those moments, or I didn't try very hard to. Despite my best intentions, I could never shake off the childish embarassment and awkwardness I felt around him. When I got married my dad sent me an angry letter about having the wedding in Toronto rather than in Saskatchewan, and our relationship never recovered. As the years passed we talked less and less, and only the topic of choral singing animated our strained conversations.

My dad was fifty-four when I was born, and eighty-seven when he died. Maybe if our lives had overlapped more, I would grown up enough to connect with him as an adult. But before that happened, my dad's mind started to fade. A few years ago I was going through some old family pictures with him—he misidentified several children in pictures clearly taken in the seventies, as people born in the forties. That was my first hint that he was starting to lose his mind. Later he fell victim to numerous scams of the kind targeted at the elderly. He grew distant and vague. Lying awake one night I realized that he was only going to get worse, that I had missed my chance have a good relationship with him. We had passed the point of no return. That was the night I started grieving for my dad.

A couple of years later, my mum and my dad's doctors decided to move him into a nursing home—his forgetfulness and inability to take care of himself were taking a toll on my mum. A year after he moved into the home, almost to the day, he died. I got the call from my mum early in the morning of September 16, 2008.

My dad and I could have been great friends, but because of lack of time, lack of effort, fear of failure, youthful stupidity or elderly stubbornness, we never were. I will always regret not trying harder to nurture those glimmers of connection. I will always grieve the loss of my father, but more than that I will grieve for the relationship we could have had.