Fluttering Hearts

I love watching my daughter secretly "fall in love". It was one of the main reasons I wanted a daughter-to get to see exactly this.

A major secret crush is brewing around here this weekend . And I agree the object of her affections is just about the most wonderful boy on earth.

Four years her senior, I can only begin to imagine how she feels so important when he pays so much attention to her. Chase’s buddy who is at Trent for three days is so gracious and so inclusive. Offers for her to go on tube with him, remarks on her nail polish, plays with her on the trampoline, claps for her when she does slalom on her skis. Asks her how she slept and blows the fire off her burnt marshmellow…awwwwww so sweet.

And I can see her falling….the little sweet smile on her lips, the way she braids her hair to ensure waves in the morning, the place she makes for him at the table and the way it pleases her to no end when he likes the food we have chosen for meals.

I told her today that this is the quality of boy becoming man that she should base herself on one day for her future husband (in like 100 years!). She should never accept anything less than this quality of human being. She needs to set her standards super high and live into those expectations. This mere fourteen year old can be what she measures men against in the future. She will remember him.

She will remember the way the his face lights up when he talks about hoping to be selected to climb the mountain in Africa, or how as profound his loss has been in the last couple of months that he still has a smile for all of us. She will remember that when he speaks of his Dad it is with honor and love and that he struggles to name him in the past tense. She will remember how even with the worst thing ever happening to this child just two months ago….that he has kept his strength and loveliness about him. She will remember the subtle but still there cloud that has now had to touch his eyes.

This gentle soul with remain with us all for many years to come.

And my daughter is taken with him in the sweetest of ways.

And I sit back and soak it all in remembering how it felt at her age to have my brother’s friends come in and out of our home and glance my way. To have been made to feel important and sometimes even beautiful by the sweet ones who made an effort to pay attention to their buddies's younger sister.To begin to measure future men against not only my brothers but by the boys they exposed me to.

I am glad that for Beauty, the standard has been set high by three simple days.

That she will always from this point forward remember greatness and want it for her one day. And not settle for anything less that what she saw before her this weekend.

And to learn the lesson…from him that is…..that even when you lose something the most precious to you…you can still go on…and still be who you are at the core…with that person smiling down upon you.

Having brought you up so well in everyway that the man you will become stems from the way you were taught as a boy and from the hand that held yours since the very beginning.

True Love

Some friends offer to take your daughter to the park.

Others offer to pick up your son after basketball practice and keep him for dinner.

Some offer to take all three of your kids on the weekend while you enjoy a romantic weekend with your husband.

 Some friends keep your kid for a week at camp while you get a lot of work done.

And those are all really nice, and kind and gentle gestures. I appreciate them to no end.

 But do you know what SHE does???????

She offers to take your son Bear to India on a humanitarian mission.

With her own FIVE kids when he is sixteen. She does that for you because she loves you and she does that for him because she loves her godson Bear to bits. And I think she recognizes a whole lot of goodness in him....

And more than anything..she won’t just say it… she will make it happen. I know she will.

So right now it doesn’t matter if Bear does not even know at this point, or matter if he would be interested or not, or matter that one of the days down there is spent massaging the feet of Indians with leprosy, or that  it is like 120 degrees in the summer, or that it costs so much money, or that you would worry way too much to let him go that far away, or that I am not sure he could even eat banana rice cakes with curry every day.

All that matters right now is how much her kindness, and warmth and love made me feel. It was just so utterly sweet and intoxicating. She is willing to give my child what I feel I cannot…for something that will change his life forever.

She is sharing the very best part of herself and he will get to have her.

It was exactly the kind of love I needed right at this very moment .

My Sister Savvy……….words are not enough for your kind and touching offer. The sweetest act of service I may have ever received.

And I know when she reads this she will think "Of course-it's no big deal I would love to take him with pleasure!!!"......but to me it is the biggest deal ever...just because that is the way it is ...each of our hearts sends and receives different things in different ways and this one is BIG.

With love, Your Lauren Kate

Being the Boss of my Brain

Following her camp experience Beauty wanted (with a bit of encouragement from me!) to write the following blog………in her own words:

My second week passed like this:

Ummm…I didn’t miss my parents the second week because I didn’t think about them that much and what helped me was thinking that I will pass two weeks with them on vacation. I participated a lot to not think about them and enjoy my second week instead of thinking about them and crying all the time.

 My parents gave me a photo of them and letters for every day. (with little gifts in them). And if I was able to control myself and not think about them too much and saying to my brain to stop thinking “I can’t wait until Friday because I am leaving” I would get Fireworks and I got the Fireworks because I was able to do those things….because I am the boss of my brain.

When they picked me up I was so happy to see them. I ran into their arms and gave them a kiss. They gave me a sandwich that I wanted and when I got home my Grandma had left me a gift under my pillow and it was a jumping rope. I felt good and I won’t have to worry anymore about my parents because they are right there.

My Mom was proud of me Saturday when they came to visit me at camp and brought me to the cottage because I said my feelings to them and then they gave me some advice to not worry. I wanted the week to change and so I would not cry I shared my feelings so the week would be better. I feel good to share my feelings because I don’t have to keep them inside of me and feel bad. I tell them to others and I don’t have to keep them.

 And I am going to continue sharing my feelings because sharing my feelings like I did Saturday was good.

My mom said something that was not intended to help me but did that 1 week would go by so quickly that she would not even have had time to mail letters because there no was no time. Canada post would say no. So my Mom knows the week will go fast and she loves me and my Dad too.

So next year in camp I will not worry a lot about my parents and enjoy the two weeks. Because you are only a kid once.

Love  Beauty  xox

Shades of Porn

This will be a short post. It has to come out of my brain.

I am in the middle of the third book of the famous trilogy “Shades of Grey” and I have come to the conclusion that I have a love hate relationship with this series.

Let’s be clear here. This trilogy is not a story-it is porn. And I am not sure if it is hard or soft porn as I don’t know porn very well.

So do I like this porn? I liked the first porn book a lot.

The second scared me a lot.

The third bores me a lot, but it seems too late as now I seem to be addicticted to this porn just like every woman, hairdresser, bus driver, receptionist and female in the world it seems.

Next thing we know nuns at my daughter’s camp will be reading this stuff and try to say that God approves of their “love”.

I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink coffee. I don’t do drugs (is an Advil a day for curing my headaches from noisy kids a drug problem?)

However  my bad habits seem to include swearing, gambling twice a year for the big bucks and more recently reading porn!!!! Oh ya and I drink milk too with my dessert .

I like the porn part, just as much as anyone but I mean can by the third book can we please have a little bit of a story line going on here????? Or at least a third party involved in these sexual acts? I mean how many pages of the same two people having sadistic sex can we read about????  And they are faithful to each other too-I mean come on..Enough is enough after 2.5 books. Spank her some more, tie her up and blindfold her, and put her to bed with some milk and cookies again and get on with it already!

But….I still go to bed and read it and awake and read it. It peeks my curiosity and I especially love that when Grey is on important business calls he holds his arms of to Anastasia to cuddle in his lap.

Ultimately I love the way he loves her. I love how he adores her. That part is particularly sweet.

And no I am not one of those lucky women who this book has the effect of spicing up my own life. It has not changed me or my marriage into these two characters.

If anything it has made me feel like why can’t I be adored like that? What is so great about Ana and her little boobs anyways? One of my buddies keeps texting me and saying that is crazy and of course it is fiction only and not real life and that there is as much chance of real people having sex that many times a day as being kidnapped.

But I still hold that kidnapping is a very real threat out there in this big bad worldJ

So I still have half a book to finish so my opinions might change between now and then and I still have the movie to see which I am dying to see who they cast in this X-rated porn movie…….but for now :

I just wish we could call a spade a spade. This is erotic porn we are all reading around the world and we all like it very much. Let’s not pretend that Anastasia Steele or Christian Grey have anything remotely exciting about to offer in terms of literature.

And let’s not pretend that keeping this book within the reaches of our kids is not the same as leaving out a page of porn on our computers for them to see.  I personally felt like a I had to admit to my 14 yr old that yes it is porn.

But we love these character anyways. And something about them stirs something about us all in different ways. The writer is brilliant to have written this just as the world seemed to need it. More than anything I wish I was the author who wrote these goldmines.

Gotta get back to my book.

Oh my.

Am I a Sailor?

That’s a very good question…

One that I have been asked a good amount of times over my life.

I should be a sailor with all the sailing I have done. Sailing school at 14yrs old for a summer, dating the national  junior sailing champion for 2 years and sailing pretty much every day with him and his crew for most of those days in those two years hot or cold in Summer, Fall and Spring. Meeting my husband and sailing every trip down south all the turquoise oceans at least twice a day when the winds were good, having access to my brother in law’s sailboat at the old cottage  and now having bought our own catamaran this year for our lake and using it often.

 So one might assume that I know how to sail..very well right?

Well not really. I am what you call a leisure sailor. As in…I lie down with a pillow in the middle of the boat, very low so that when we tack and jibe there is no chance of the boom hitting me across the bed, I close my eyes, slather on the sunscreen and try to tan as much a humanly possible with the chaos that surrounds me each time we set sail.

After all of the years if my husband fell off the boat or something I am not quite sure I could get us home even. My two boys can outsail me at the mere ages of 12 and 14 and could even handle our  2 sail catamaran.  Kind of embarrassing eh?

My husband on the other hand is an incredible sailor with no formal training at all. I love watching him manoeuver these things…it is darn sexy to watch a man so utterly in control and just so darn competent.

Both boys are also extremely skilled with just a couple of summers of sailing lessons behind them. All are naturals when it comes to wind and water.

It must be a girl thing. It started a long time ago.

At camp with my Soul keeper when we were both teenagers we begged our parents to send us to sailing camp for a month. My parents could not afford it but they came up with the amount anyways…and what did I do??? We chased boys all summer, skipped sail camp and played hooky most days and basically sat on a little Opthi in the middle of the lake praying the wind would not pick up. And when it did pick up? We spent a lot of time in the middle of the lake chasing the boat that had tipped over. What a disaster.

What it did teach me however is how much I love boats. And being a sailed.

So now in our family the boys sail us around and my daughter and I both lie in the middle, close our eyes shut tightly, say a prayer and do a whole lot of whining and screaming when the wind picks up. When they trapeze and we get splashed all over the place and have water in our eyes and almost fall off the boat, we open out eyes and scream louder. With each tack, they all move about us, and change the ropes and ask us to please get off of the flippingropes and be more considerate..and so we do until the next tack. It’s a ton of fun though!

And yesterday Chase even fell off the boat it was so rough and I saved him. I pulled him back in, so I was the hero. I was laughing so hard at him, poor guy. Don’t think he thought it was too funny!

So what I love most about sailing and these interactions on the boat is how much it mirrors our lives…I mean that’s just us..all chaotic, and bickering, and laughing and loving. The guys trying to get some serious stuff done and the girls trying their best to relax, until they get fed up of us and drop us off (or make us swim) home to make them lunch. We are good at making corn.

Our ski boat is a lot more predictable and certainly less chaotic, but we live out our loves on both of them rain and shine.” Five at Sea” and now our sailboat” "In the Fall”…..are part of us. Part of our package.Without them both …….we would not be living out our lives the way we have always known them.

So am I a sailor??? The answer is yes I most definitely am.

And just like my real life, my hair blows in the wind while I try to keep balance and figure it all out. I try to relax amongst chaos, and try to turn directions with many obstacles in the way. And just like my real life, I have these great partners and kids around me, each of us doing what we do best and remaining a team and trying to help eachother out here and there while screaming above the wind; yelling often but smiling often too just because it is all so much fun. And precisely where we want to be at that moment.

Yes I am a sailor.

Giving

It’s so true what is said about giving; that when we give from our hearts we feel so good ourselves. Giving gifts..is often so much better than receiving.

My son and I gave a very special gift about a month ago. Something that could never ever be enough, but was a very small token of our heartfelt sadness of a loss. Something we took together over a month to decide on..together.

When Chase’s friend lost his Dad 2 months ago…….it was extremely sad to say the least. I wrote a post on this and the funeral back in June.

We decided a month after his Dad’s passing to write a long letter to the Mom and 3 kids and tell them how beautiful and moving the funeral was. Included in that letter were gift certificates for the three kids to come for a swim and dinner at our place and to go to Sky Venture with our family-which is a very cool and expensive flying assimilation experience. Not something you do everyday or even in a lifetime. During this time we also bought a gift certificate for the Mom to have a relaxing massage at our fave spa.

And they were so happy to receive this gift. And we were so happy to give it to them and for them to be happy for even those few moments. The event is planned for a few weeks form now.

And since then…every one Chase sees he tells about this gift…..he is so proud..and so happy to have given it. It came straight from his heart and he is thrilled that it touched his friend and his family so profoundly.

Chase realized through this gift how important acts of service and kindness can be to others in time of need. And how really…although a gift could never change or alter a situation or a loss;.that people need to be taken care of through their grief and most importantly to be acknowledged.

So their son will come a couple of times to our cottage this summer and we will be there for him. Not to pretend he did not endure such profound loss…but to just be there for whatever he needs. To make sure he is the priority. And even if we are not close to the family, or even my son is not his closest friend….to be there for others..and offer your support. To not be shy when it comes to giving. There is never enough love for anybody in this world who is experiencing such grief...that is what I told Chase.

I am so proud of Chase and I think he is proud of me too. All because of this gift that brought us together in this terrible experience. Because we gave our hearts and it felt good to do this together.

 There is nothing like real life to teach our kids the hardest but most profound  lessons is there?

Angels over the Years

(sorry for typos-no time to edit today)

I started thinking back this morning to all the wonderful and not so wonderful people we have had working in our home over the years, ensuring that while we are at work-our home is taken care of.

When the kids were younger, I travelled more for my work and my job has often held as part of it a host of local and not so local offsite dinners and evenings with its peak a few years back that lasted about three years.

My husband takes time off..but for vacation only. Rarely for other reasons. When I am away or at work, it is others and not him who come to our homes and kid’s rescue.

We never had a nanny . We have always had housekeepers 1-1.5 days per week and then my Mom over the last number of years taking the kids to their activities, doing errands and managing our home in a lot of way. The work she does for us deserves another future post of it’s own.

This one is about our housekeepers…often referred to as angels who have saved us from starving over the years. Laundry, meals, preparations for meals for guests on the weekend. Cleaning, dusting, ordering groceries. Picking up the kids if needed and helping them to grow into responsible young adults by chastising them to make their beds and put  their clothes in the hamper. Watching over them in summer when they are home and feeding them lunches. Always within that day and a half..but a lot gets done over 12 hours if the delegation is done properly.

We started off with an angel..and have an angel now but in between….,my word there were some strange ladies! (and man)

 Our first angel was an older, very bossy lady who has strong opinions, the body of an ox and a heart of gold. She cleaned and cleaned and cooked us stews and ironed and  my brought my Hubby’s underwear more than once home to sew up any holes. She nurtures and loved our children and sent them money at Easter and their birthdays for years after she retired. She loved our family as her own…and we loved her too…although part of her scared us too…she was one overpowering lady. More than anything-she was wonderful and my children were adored.

So what that she never followed instructions? So what if our food was made with heavy cream and heart attack inducing? So what if she took it upon herself to put our handmade Italian blinds through the laundry machine and shrunk many good shirts? She loved us more than life and was with us for many of our kid’s formative years. She was a keeper. And then she had to retire. We still keep in touch. My husband calls her every year on her birthday.

Between that angel and today’s angel…we were not as lucky. We had one of the worst housekeepers humanly possible for a year who I think truly hated us and our children. Her idea of a meal was a big ham, with no sauce on it, no gravy, no veggies, no potatoes and no plates, with a big fork in it in the middle of the table. Hard as rock and tasteless –this was her act of love. She hated our home and her job…..and we did not feel very favorably towards her either. None shed a single tear the day she left.

 We had another lovely couple come and tend to our home that were very odd. Their cleaning was amazing but I never trusted them. I let them go when 2000$ was stolen in cash that was left in an envelope of the renovation guy. To this day we don’t know if it was them who took it or the people doing renovations. I tried not to let their appearances intimidate me over the years-they were massive people. Between them maybe 15 feet tall and 750 pounds..of pure muscle. They were like two giraffes…they scared me a lot (and scared the kids). They never smiled much.

 A couple of good and sweet cleaners in between. Can’t really remember them much.shows how long that lasted.

Then SHE came along about 5 years ago and is truly our angel. She makes the best meals you have ever tasted..it’s like a personal chef. She can whip up muffins from anything in your fridge and prepare a dinner party in a couple of hours. She is kind, gentle, interesting and adoring. She waits for the kids to come home afterschool because she loves talking to them about rodeos and hockey. She loves sleeping over when we go away in winter as she loves spending time with the children and they love her too. She is discreet, sweet and wonderful.

Her laundry and cooking are perfect. Her housecleaning is good…but won’t have our house sparkle as if a team came in and cleaned it..but I prefer that sparkle in my laundry, my food and her smile. We are all different in what is important to us and she is the perfect fit for our family... I think I would dig a hole and bury myself in it the day she leaves our family. To me she is simply not replaceable. She is wonderful for our family and for our needs. She very rarely has missed a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon all of these years and I thank god for her dependability and reliability.

 So although often we are at work…….we have a system that works for us with the angels that have cared for our home. It’s a load of work to delegate properly, but much easier than doing it ourselves! It’s worth all the money I dish out for these services for the peace of mind and the hearty meals on my table twice a week.

Add my Mom in there a few afternoons a week and I have a really win win situation going on that I thank God for every day. I am a career woman that is certain, but I have never, ever wanted my kids to be subject to my choices. I wanted to give them a partial stay at home mom feeling and I think they have always had it. And this makes me happy. I feel like our plan worked and the kids are reaping the benefits.

So to all those who have taken care of us at home a huge thank you for the peace you provide me. And even to those who took a ham out of the freezer and stuck it on my table….you taught me what I could not tolerate and made me select with more care the next time. It is because of you…that I have an angel in my home now. You..led me to HER.