Category: Swimming

Best of summer

Best of summer

Top ten travel locations so far this summer

1. the point at Seeley’s Bay, Ontario
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2. soccer field(s), Fooey’s team
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 3. soccer field(s), Albus’s team
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4. soccer field(s), AppleApple’s team
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5. Silver Lake camp
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6. Kingston, for tournament, with siblings, cousins, aunt and Grandma
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7. Swimplex, Nepean, with cousins, aunt and Grandma
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8. Ottawa
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9. en route, from somewhere to somewhere
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10. our house; swim lessons; friends’ houses; backyard
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Top five reasons I’m blogging less this summer.

1. I’m out and about with the kids all the time. And I’m swimming at lunchtime.
2. I’m prioritizing writing work in those spare moments not populated by children and their summer activities (and mine).
3. Blog-time is going largely toward building a new web site to house this slightly long-in-the-tooth blog.
4. Summer. Have I mentioned summer?
5. See above. And below.

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last day of school, June 26, 2014
Life skills

Life skills

Summer is here. And I am not, so much, here.

I keep taking photos of everywhere we go, and everything we do, but my photo computer is dying a long slow death (probably caused by the photos), making processing next to impossible. And time is of the essence. I wonder who first expressed that phrase. Time is of the essence. Could it have been Shakespeare? AppleApple and I listened to Bill Bryson’s biography of Shakespeare on our long drive this weekend. We both got a kick out of it.

She and I were in Ottawa all weekend for provincials. She won a silver medal with her relay team, and achieved personal bests in all of her swims, making for a happy time at the pool. (I watched World Cup matches on a TV hung on the wall just outside the pool deck doors, which, I won’t lie, was an awesome way to see the games — instant community.) Out of the pool, we walked to Parliament Hill, spent time with family, and I went for early morning runs along the Rideau Canal. “You should have brought your running shoes!” I said on the first evening, picturing a mother-daughter jog beside the still waters, and she said, “Mom, do you remember why we’re here? My coach said I’m not supposed to run before races!” Oh, right. Swimming. Not holidaying. I’m glad I forgot for a bit. I’m glad it felt like a holiday.

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While we were away, my baby went off to camp for the first time. Two nights. And I wasn’t even there. I miss him in a way that I can’t even express so I’m trying instead to suppress. Know what I mean? “Mom, I think he’s handling this better than you are.”

School is out. It’s hot.

I need more alone time. I’m wearing ear plugs. We have a lost library book to deal with and a wrong-sized swim suit to return and swim lessons starting today. I have no idea how I will get any work done this summer; or more specifically, today, or on any day this coming week. I’m feeling slightly afraid; also overwhelmed. With everyone around it seems like there is less time to be writer-me. I can figure this out, right?

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I’m on the cover of the summer edition of Quill & Quire. It may be out, in fact, but I haven’t seen it yet, I’ve only seen this, posted on Twitter by Stacey May Fowles:

Wrote about the charming and insightful @carrieasnyder and Girl Runner for @quillandquire. cc @HouseofAnansihttp://instagram.com/p/pyqO1djjyz/

Kevin mopped the house while we were away. It looks incredibly clean.

He also decided we should teach the kids LIFE SKILLS this summer. How to clip your own nails. How to poach an egg. How to make a smoothie and clean the counter afterwards. Etc. Things they should probably already know, but perhaps don’t, that we expect them to know intuitively, but they just don’t. He should be in charge more often.

This is the way we play

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Saturday. Early rising. Long drive. Poolside. Laptop open.
“Are you writing your next novel right here?”
“Erm. Kind of. Well, yes, actually. I’m trying.”

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Saturday evening. Barely awake. Stroll uptown. The whole family.
Burger Badanga at the Chainsaw. (Fundraiser for Habitat for Humanity)
Free face/arm-painting.

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Also, burgers, beer, pop with unlimited refills.
But really it’s all about the football.
England v. Italy.
Not the hoped-for outcome.
“I always feel sad for whoever loses.”
“Wow, Mom. Someone always loses.”

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Sunday. Early rising. Ritual stop at best early-morning coffee & breakfast joint in town, City Cafe, aka “the bagel place.” Long drive. Poolside. Laptop.
The kid is fast and strong. The mother is plain worn out.

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Stop for falafel and chicken shwarma. Eat under tree. Long drive home.
Followed by deep nap.
Followed by must get up and do days’ worth of laundry, run errands, and think up Father’s Day supper.

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Meet “Vanna,” above, our new front yard dwarf cherry tree. “Stella” is in the back yard. Two apple trees, as yet unnamed, await planting.
Neighbour we’ve never met stops to tell Kevin: “I’ve been walking by your front yard for the past ten years, and I just want to tell you how much I enjoy watching what you’re doing here.”
I think: Kevin’s dad, enthusiastic gardener, would have been so proud.

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I call my dad.

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Supper: hot dogs, bacon, fixings, roasted asparagus, kale slaw (“You shouldn’t call it that! Nobody’s going to want to eat it!”).
After supper: playing in the back yard. Kevin: Gardening and soccer-ball juggling. Albus: Trampoline and soccer. Fooey: Trampoline and soccer-ball juggling. CJ: Soccer, soccer, soccer. Me and AppleApple: catch, with tennis ball and baseball gloves.
The long late light. The best part of summer.
“Should we be responsible parents and tell everyone to go bed?”
“Do we have to?”

We were very tired, we were very merry

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Recuerdo

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

We were very tired, we were very merry–
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable–
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on the hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry–
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind went cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morning, mother!” to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and the pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

(first published in 1919)

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The refrain of this poem keeps running through my head. We were very tired, we were very merry.

I drove my swim child to Windsor and home again all in one day, yesterday. “Did you have a good day, Mom?” she asked me. The stoplight turned green ahead of us, and I checked the rearview mirror. “There were many good things about this day,” I allowed, thinking more of the long dark drive ahead, and the lateness of the hour, the responsibility of getting us safely home heavy on me. “Did you have a good day?” I asked her.

“Yes! I had a really good day.” I wish you could hear her voice. The sigh of deep satisfaction.

“Well, then I had a really good day too.”

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Expectations, meet day

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the view from our hotel room: downtown Windsor

Today has not gone as I expected it would, and that has made me grumpy. At times, today, I’ve been excessively grumpy, bursting with the misery of expectation unmet. But now is better. Now I’ve been writing and walking, simultaneously, for an hour and a half, or 1.92 miles.

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What happened today is that Albus got sick. Apparently he has strep now, too. So the morning was spent waiting at the doctor’s office, waiting at the pharmacy, and making soup for lunch. I needed a longer nap post-kettlebell class. There is a mountain of laundry from our weekend.

It was noon before I arrived at my computer.

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This weekend AppleApple and I went to Windsor, Ontario together. We drove ahead of the snow storm, and spent two nights in a hotel, and had an excellent time together. She was beaming at the end of yesterday’s races, and we were home before bedtime.

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At the hotel, we discovered that TV is a highly addictive substance. I’m so thankful we don’t have it on tap at home. AppleApple was reduced to staring empty-eyed at anything that appeared on-screen. When she first turned the TV on, she sat waiting patiently, parked on the first channel she’d come to. “This is a really long commercial,” she observed, to which I replied, “What on earth are you doing?” “Waiting to see what’s on.” “Channel surf!” I commanded her, but she only stared blankly and I realized I was talking to a true television novice. Good heavens, my 11-year-old does not know how to channel surf. I count this as a plus. Of course, then I taught her how to go about it.

I had to ban the TV in order for us to get anything else done. It was probably the highlight of her trip. My highlight was just being with her.

Blissfully awake

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Some days I don’t have so much to say. Some days I’m teeming with ideas. Today is the former. I find myself a bit dazed and distant, wandering my treadmill (though I promised not to mention it). Maybe it was being awoken at 4:44 AM by a whining dog, and then submitting to the realization that I wasn’t fated to fall back asleep, given that my alarm was set for 5:05 AM. And the dog would not stop whining. Even after I took her outside.

4:44

I brought the dog inside. I drank a glass of water and brushed my teeth. I woke my daughter for swimming. I dressed and did yoga in the dark of the living-room. And then I went out for a run (-19C). It was a bit earlier than I usually go, and the streets seemed especially dark and empty. My eyelashes became bejewelled with droplets of ice. Cold seeped through my double and triple and quadruple layers. I ran as fast as I could, but I couldn’t run myself warm. I saw three people during my entire run, and a single vehicle passed me. The neighbourhood felt that emptied out, that silent, that blissfully asleep. And I was blissfully awake. I am a complete convert to the early morning.

The people I saw: one woman going for a walk; one woman going for a run; one man I’ve seen before (or smelled, more precisely), who walks down the middle of a particular street smoking a cigar at approximately 6:15 AM (eep!).

Before kids and jobs, as a university student, my interior clock was switched around. I did my best work after midnight, and had difficulty rising in time to make my 11 o’clock classes. Maybe waking early is just another version of that devotion to the hours when most of the world is asleep. I think that’s what I love about being awake early. I love the quiet. The illusion of solitude. The sense of being a watchful eye on the sleeping houses.

My daughter was so happy when I picked her up at the pool, maybe for the same reasons, though I don’t know for sure.

I’m not saying it’s easy to set the alarm, or that it comes naturally, even now, after several years of practice. Oddly, it’s actually not. It’s actually something that I have to remind myself, almost every single time, will be worth it. If there’s a secret to discipline, it’s this: the first step is the hardest one to take. I forget this regularly, and learn it again, regularly, very often at 5 o’clock in the morning when my resistance is low and I’m somehow willing to stagger forth. The first step is the hardest.