I was impressed that my friend had made the leap – no apologies – to a life and a household with kids. It got me – a new mom of one – thinking that I may be attempting to salvage some semblance of my former life. For one, the adult furniture remains intact. For two, the hardwood floors remain unscratched, and there is hope that they will stay this way. For three, I try to keep the house tidy, which is proving harder to do by the day.

Then I started thinking – are there other remnants of my former life that I’m still clinging to, as well? There’s the fact that my husband and I still go out to restaurants for dinner, nine-month-old baby in tow. We have refused to give up this indulgence, despite the fussing, ruining of tables with spoons, and most recently, bouts of shrieking just for fun.

But things are changing. For one, we no longer get invited to certain childless friends’ posh homes. For two, we scarf down our meals. (You never know when baby will need attention.) For three, after managing to avoid all addictive vices my entire adult life, coffee is my new BFF.

My house has not yet turned into one giant playroom, but I suspect it’s not far off. And while I miss certain aspects of my former life – impromptu dates with my husband, putting my feet up in the evening, sleeping through the night – having my son in my life is completely worth it – without a doubt.

I imagined my father and two aunts as little kids running around the farm where they grew up.

Now at age 94, I know my grandma’s answer is still the same. In nearly a century of living, the very best moments of her life were when her kids were little.

This story has stuck with a friend of mine whose daughter is five months old – the same age as my son Maks.

“What if these are the best moments of our lives?” She says.

If I live to be 100 and someone asks me the same question, I can imagine that I might very well answer the same way.

I believe that every time during our life can and should be the time of our life. But there is something truly special about the time when our kids are little… the life-changing event of seeing your newborn, the awe and wonder of watching your child grow and develop, the profound love and joy that only a parent can understand… there is nothing else like it.

They grow up so fast, people lament. It’s hard to believe that my son is already five months old. He is indeed growing up very fast. In so many ways, I’m trying to capture these early days – photos galore, videos, audio recordings, photo shoots, photo books, a journal, imprints of his hands and feet, a clipping of his hair, and images burned into my memory. But still I know that no amount of record-keeping will truly capture these incredible moments.

So I realized that the only thing to do is simply enjoy this time – these are the days to remember.

However, any notion of being seasoned travellers disappeared when we threw a baby into the mix.

We recently flew from Calgary to Florida with our three-month-old son. We arrived at the airport a little earlier than usual with two large suitcases, a stroller, a car seat, a car seat base, a diaper bag and a nursing pillow.

Our first task: to fit the car seat base into one of the suitcases. Realizing that we hadn’t left enough room for the surprisingly bulky base, we found ourselves rearranging all of our belongings on an airport bench.

Next, we fumbled through the line to check our luggage. Holding baby in one arm, I manoeuvred a heavy stroller and an even heavier suitcase with the other. At that moment, I wondered how my sister was faring – she was meeting us in Florida, and managing a baby, a stroller, a car seat, a heavy suitcase and carry-on luggage all on her own.

At security, we were ushered into a separate line reserved for disorganized parents with youngsters.

At the gate, we became the travellers that every passenger dreads: the parents with a fussy baby. Our son is an angel most of the day, but around 7 p.m. he becomes inconsolable.  Learning the hard way never to schedule a flight during your baby’s fussy time, we tried desperately and unsuccessfully to soothe him, whilst the other passengers looked on in horror: “Oh, please don’t let those people be on my flight.”

Relief swept over us when our baby settled down on the plane. When the toddler one row ahead of us threw a tantrum that lasted the better part of the five-hour flight, we felt empathy for his parents – rather than irritation. It could have been us, we realized. It could have been us.

A few things we learned along the way when travelling with a baby:

• Leave enough room in your luggage for the car seat base.
• Always pack a soother and a bottle, and have them ready at a moment’s notice.
• Don’t take four carry-on bags on a plane with a baby, even if you happen to hit the outlet mall on your trip.
• Don’t be too hard on yourself if you discover yourself a bumbling fool: travelling with a baby is a whole new adventure.

Never Before

Never before has a person loved
An ear, an eye, a mouth so much.
Ten mini fingers, ten tiny toes,
A chin, a shin, a sweet little nose.

And never before has one adored
A smile so much, an “ah-goo” more.
Your happy face, your furrowed brow,
Your sighs, your cries, I love them all.

Years from now, when you’re old and gray,
And you look in the mirror and look away,
Know that a person never loved
An ear, an eye, a nose so much.

And know that this love still follows you,
Wherever you go, whatever you do.

As a very recent new mom, I’ve just landed the toughest job in the world.

As a teenager, I toiled a couple of summers at a spice factory. There I laboured on the lines, packaging bottles of spice, shrink wrapping bundles of bottles and sweeping the floors of overflow. It was a tough job, for sure. I had sore feet from standing for hours and aching arms from repetitive motions.

Then there were the days when I was sent upstairs to dip into the barrels of spice with a shovel and dump the spices into the machines below. I threw out my back on that particular assignment.

Besides the heavy lifting and repetitive strain, there was also the stench. Praise be the days we had cinnamon on the lines. Some days you reeked of garlic, others of onion powder. If you took the bus home from work, your fellow travellers avoided you like the plague. Yet those smells were nothing compared to someone accidentally blowing onion powder in your eyes while cleaning the machinery.

Tough job, sure. But nothing compared to my present occupation.

Another summer, I worked at an inn as a chambermaid in Normandy, France where I served a slave-driving witch of a woman that I’ll kindly refer to as “Madame.”

Madame was the type of woman who stood behind you when you washed the dishes and told you how to hold the cloth. She scolded you for leaving a speck of skin on a peeled potato, and barraged you with comments like “We don’t eat like pigs in France” – implying, of course, that we do eat like pigs elsewhere.

She was loathed by all her staff. Once, when I mentioned to a part-timer that I planned to work the entire summer at the inn, she shook her head and told me angrily, “Tu vas craquer!” You’re gonna crack.

To get her money’s worth (and she was paying me pennies), Madame got me up at the crack of dawn and kept me working until the late hours of the evening. I recall hanging laundry on the line while bats circled my head one night. Her idea of a “day off” was allowing me to sleep ‘til noon just once the entire time I worked there.

When I told Madame that I quit, she refused to drive me to the train station until I had put in another week of hard labour. Being in the countryside in the middle of nowhere, I grudgingly accepted the terms.

It was a tough job, for sure. I was frustrated, physically worn out and completely sleep-deprived. Still, those days look lazy now compared to my recent undertaking as “mother to newborn.”

“Mother to newborn” simply takes the cake as the toughest job on earth. Even at demanding jobs, you get a few hours off. Mother to newborn gets no such luxury.

Mother to newborn is on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. After an exhausting day and just as she passes into blissful REM sleep, she is awoken again – Back to the grind! Back to the grind!

Mother to newborn passes through her day in a zombie-like state, learning new newborn-related jobs, navigating the surprisingly difficult task of breastfeeding, whilst recovering from the most painful experience of her life. And unlike other tireless, devoted workers who put in insane hours at the office, she is not recognized for her efforts.

When an employee at a company stays late and works weekends to get a job done, he may be rewarded with a promotion. At the very least, someone considers him a martyr. But when a mother puts in overtime and volunteers for 24-hour call day after day after day, she’s not considered a martyr. She’s simply doing what every mother in the history of the world has done before her.

Wow, new moms, I salute you. Since giving birth to my baby on December 8, I’ve joined the ranks of the toughest workers in the world. What a grind it is, but, thankfully, unlike the tough jobs I worked as a teen, I also find being a new mom the most wonderful and rewarding job in the world.

I was fifteen years old, it was a Saturday night, and I was attending a party in a neighbourhood across town. It was there I met a boy and, somehow or another, fell into a conversation about friends versus girlfriends. I can no longer recall the boy’s face, but I remember very vividly what he said. He proclaimed to me and anyone else who may have been listening, “Friends are forever, chicks ain’t.”

I was affronted by this statement. And soon after, on my sixteenth birthday, my three best girlfriends and I were out for dinner at a restaurant discussing the offending remark. Then and there, we decided to turn that adage around.

The new statement would be Friends are Forever, Guys Ain’t – FAFGA for short. My girlfriends and I created a FAFGA club that same evening and promptly inducted ourselves into it. We were proud to be part of this club – a club known mostly just to the four of us. FAFGA bonded us in friendship and, in a way, helped to carry us through an assortment of failed high school relationships.

And the adage we’d created turned out to be true – at least for the duration of high school – friends were forever and guys were not. Nearly 20 years later, the four of us girls are still close friends. On the contrary, not one of our early boyfriend relationships survived in to our twenties.

However, as we grew and matured, something interesting happened – something we hadn’t factored in to the FAFGA equation. We decided to get married and pledge our love, loyalty and lifelong commitment to none other than guys.

FAFGA began to unravel.

At each of our wedding receptions, the other FAFGA members would get up to the podium, tell the FAFGA story, and then humbly concede to the audience that husbands were, in fact, forever. The husbands were then invited into the club, and FAFGA transformed in to the unwieldy FAFAHAT acronym – Friends are Forever and Husbands are Too.

A few years passed and something even more interesting happened. We began giving birth to boys. Meredith has Cohen. Melanie has Henry. And Julie is the proud mother of three children – all boys. In December, I joined the club, giving birth to my first baby – an adorable, wonderful little boy named Maks.

Our families, for the moment at least, are comprised entirely of guys.

The irony has not escaped us.

I figure it can be none other than the spirit of FAFGA returned from our high school days to poke a little fun and prove us all wrong once again….

Some guys are forever, too.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,400 times in 2010. That’s about 3 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 11 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 17 posts. There were 21 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 4mb. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was February 16th with 52 views. The most popular post that day was Running – a Metaphor for Life.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were elffolk.com, facebook.com, becauseallthecoolkidsaredoingit.blogspot.com, mail.live.com, and twitter.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for tina mcfadden, “tina mcfadden”, elffolk by tina mcfadden, crystal cleaning tina toronto, and tina mcfaddin.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Running – a Metaphor for Life February 2010
1 comment

About July 2009

The Networking Game July 2010
5 comments

Smelling the Roses August 2010
6 comments

Spring Cleaning April 2010
5 comments

On the first day of class, we went around the room and introduced ourselves. Then the instructor asked the dads-to-be why they were attending the class. Each husband gave a respectable answer: He wanted to support his wife during the delivery; he wanted to be more involved in the labour and birth process.

Mine was the only husband who pointed at his spouse and said, “She made me.” He then felt compelled to add, “I thought my place was in the waiting room.”

Ha ha. Totally inappropriate. Laughs all around.

In a later class, we were asked to do a relaxation exercise – to practise relaxing during labour. The expecting moms lay down on their sides and pretended to be in labour, while the husbands massaged arms and gently coaxed us to “relax, release and let go.”

All around me I heard devoted, supportive husbands offering encouraging words to their partners. Then I heard my husband hissing in a menacing, Darth Vader-like voice, “Releeease. Releeeeeeease.”

Between “Can you try to be serious?” even I had to laugh.

At first, I felt like my husband just wasn’t into the whole thing. But as the classes progressed, I started to appreciate what he was doing. He attended every class and started enjoying them. He even missed a few late night hockey ice times, which happened to fall on the same night as the birth class.

While there’s still no talking to the tummy, the man has put together the crib, the dresser, the stroller, the glider, the bassinet and the baby monitor. He cooks practically all the meals and makes sure I eat enough (left to my own devices, I tend to wait too long between meals). He’s attended all of my midwife appointments and accompanies me on the many trips to Babies R Us to add items to our registry. (The sleek, dark grey diaper bag that could double as a laptop bag – his pick.)

Then a few weeks ago, on a two-day vacation in Banff, my appreciation culminated. Engrossed in the second novel of the Stieg Larsson trilogy one evening, I glanced over to see my husband reading his novel of choice – The Baby Whisperer. The Baby Whisperer is a popular parenting book, and one I had just finished reading. He read the book to the end, refers to it from time to time, and now encourages me to reread it.

I guess sometimes people surprise you.

Maybe it’s not such a long walk from the waiting room to the delivery room.

But now at 30 weeks, the honeymoon is over. As I entered my third trimester, all the symptoms associated with this notorious trimester hit me like a ton of bricks. There’s heartburn, insomnia and fatigue. There are leg cramps that have me jumping out of bed in the middle of the night. There’s the back fat….

Hold up — BACK FAT? Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve always been a slim jim, so this back fat is brand new territory. To console myself, I figure it’s there to serve its purpose – probably to offset all the weight on the front side, so I don’t tip over when I’m standing.

Anyway, with the growing waistline and onslaught of symptoms comes a lethargic feeling like I’ve never felt before. I find myself casually stepping over balls of cat fur that blow around the house like small tumbleweeds. I see food crumbs gathering on my belly and I nonchalantly brush them on to the floor. And this morning, for the first time ever since I can remember, I considered not making my bed.

Why make the bed when you’re just going to mess it up again in a few hours? My husband has always understood this logic, and yet, it has only just occurred to me. It stands to reason that you would make the bed if you were having company, or if you were showing your house to potential buyers. But when it’s just you who sees the bed – isn’t the ritual a little pointless?

As I settle onto the couch for the long haul, it is my husband who chases fur balls with the Dust Buster and sweeps crumbs from under the coffee table. He’s never been one to clean the house from top to bottom, but he’s very diligent about this sort of “spot” cleaning.

Thankfully, our latest splurge involves a housekeeper (and a godsend), so my house is not overrun with small rodents.

I hear that just before babies arrive, pregnant women are magically struck with a sudden urge to sanitize and sterilize everything in sight. I imagine the instinct will strike me, too… at some point. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, I’m quite enjoying my newfound laziness.

I don’t know where the ideas come from, but they usually start with a bolt of inspiration. An idea will pop into my head, and I’m suddenly compelled to write – even if it happens to be 3:00 in the morning.

I know things are going well when I’m in “the zone.” This is the place where I lose track of time. I could sit down to write, with the intention of writing for half an hour, but the words just flow, and the next time I glance at the clock, several hours may have passed.

Being in the zone can happen to anyone who is doing what he or she loves – like my father who has a hobby refinishing antiques and renovating houses. He’ll work for hours on end, forgetting to eat. You know he’s working on one of his projects when he gets very thin.

The other question I often get is, “How do you find the discipline to finish a novel?”

Some people like starting things. I like finishing things. Maybe it’s as simple as that.

I’m not one of those disciplined writers who sits down every day at the same time for one hour, or whatever the specified timeframe, to work on my novel. Some authors recommend this approach, but it has never worked for me. I write when the inspiration strikes.

It helps that I love creative writing. I have been writing fiction since I could hold a pencil. By age nine, inspired by Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden, I had written a whole series of mystery novels about a young female detective named Mary Birks.

As a kid, I’d spend my summers typing up my Mary Birks stories on my old manual typewriter. (You remember those typewriters where your fingers got stuck between the keys?) Then my mother bought an electric typewriter. Typing on that electric typewriter was a dream – my favourite feature the back-space white-out button.

While other kids were playing sports, attending camp, or doing whatever kids do during summer vacation, I was writing stories. No one told me to do it, and I never felt compelled to finish my books. In fact, there were a few stories that I never completed. The end result – finishing the novel – was never forefront in my mind.

I loved the process. I still do.

Maybe there is no greater secret to finishing a novel than that.