works of wanderlust

Tag: parenting

  • weekend wrap, seventeen

    Ahh… one short.

    This should have been my eighteenth weekend wrap. How crazy would have that worked out!?

    I have been feeling all the feels this last week because as I write this my daughter is off to school on her eighteenth birthday. All grown up and my legal obligations as a parental unit caregiver done, I now get to lean back and consider what remains of the moral obligations and how to navigate being the parent of an adult.  So weird.

    This weekend was busy in relation to all that.

    Friday I added to my rewatched list My Neighbour Totoro, one of the more famous of the Ghibli films, a list that got a little bit more important since we officially scored tickets to the Japanese park in a few months. Refreshing the sights and sounds of these films in my head will add to the enjoyment of the visit, I presume.

    Saturday rolled in and The Kid (I guess it was the last weekend I can call her that, huh?) and I scooted over to Starbucks. She had an essay to work on. I had my regular writing vibe going on. Her fancy coffee cost literally three times as much as mine. Yikes.

    The in-laws showed up unexpectedly with the intention of taking The Kid for a pre-birthday lunch, so we tagged along for that. It was more a brunch, by her request, which only means I trained her well enough these las eighteen years to respect the most important meals of the day.

    We scooted over to West Edmonton Mall for a few hours on Saturday afternoon. We’re not casual shoppers, to be honest, so it was more a mission trip to find The Kid her birthday gift. I wandered and took photos and met the gals back at the bubble tea store.

    Following a dinner of sushi from the mall, we trekked downtown to start the theatre season. We are seasons tickets holders for the Citadel and our first play of 25/26 was an adaptation of Life of Pi, which was phenomenal. 

    Sunday I led the crew on a twelve klick run. I am officially in training for my race in a little over a month, which means inching my distance back up to a ten miler equivalent. It’s completely do-able, it’s just been a few months since I’ve run more than ten klicks. Autumn was definitely showing its colours.

    The Kid had a friend over to watch a movie for her class, so I went for a stroll and bought the ingredients for my gag gift for her eighteenth. Where we live, eighteen is the age of majority which means she can technically buy booze and cannabis and vote and gamble, all legally. I bought her some scratch tickets and a bottle of the most barely-a-wine wine I could find and a goofy card. Oh, dad.

    I made dinner and we cleaned up and settled into a chill evening. Our last evening as parents of a “kid” was spent doing the most parent of things: sitting on the couch, watching tv, helping her with her homework, and going to be at a reasonable hour. 

  • weekend wrap, eleven

    Last week was a busy week. Some work-related, professional stuff occupied my days (oddly enough) and my the time Friday rolled around my head was crammed full of half-baked frustrations with the state that summer has on the speed of business. It was always my least favourite time of year to try and get things done, and this year has been no exception.

    Alas, nothing some sporadic video gaming interspersed with various parenting emergencies couldn’t distract from.

    The blur of a mid-summer weekend included:

    Friday evening was a bit of an adventure trying to sort out a lost airpod for the Kid which meant driving across town to locate it.

    I watched a movie to relax. I settled into the couch and something inclined me to put on Cast Away, you know, the old Tom Hanks on a deserted island movie, and oddly enough it boosted my spirits a little bit after a weird week.

    Saturday morning was a little lazy, but the Kid needed to catch up on paperwork (yeah, figure that one out!) and so wanted to trip over to Starbucks and do her work over a coffee. This is my life now. I joined her and did some writing while she did her stuff.

    The weather was spotty, raining mostly, so the gals decided to do a morning costco run. Saturday at costco is always a bit sketchy, and with it being summer and raining it hit the mark. We tried to find something we could all agree on to cook for dinner but failed miserably. 

    I spent a good chunk of the afternoon prone on the couch, jumping between reading and playing some cozy video games, so reporting on that is a bit of mixed bag of “yeah, I needed to chill for a couple hours” and “lazy dude sits on couch.”

    Then the adventure began.  Well, not really. The kid got roped into a summer dance performance (even tho we thought she was all done with the studio) for a local highland games. The weather was garbage and the car needed gas, so we took my truck and I drove. I sat in the parking lot reading my book until she wandered back after the show an hour and a half later and oof… dead battery in the truck.  We got a boost from one of the other adults, but in the process I noticed my last-legs battery was corroded to the point of imminent failure

    Sunday morning I met the crew for a run and coffee, as usual, and as reported on in a previous post. 

    Then I went home, got showered and changed, and headed over to the store to buy a new battery for the truck. Changing it out—time spent mostly cleaning the corrosion off the leads—took about an hour and then I went for a little drive to make sure there was a solid charge in the new battery.

    I decided it was time to put my feet up and put the hammock out in the backyard, then waded out in grass up past my ankles, and nestled into my hammock… for about seven seconds. I figured I should probably cut the grass before I relaxed completely, and promptly checked off both those items from my afternoon list.

    The making of dinner followed, and after settling in to finish off another book while I waited for the food to digest (and the community free time at the pool to end at seven) I started reading a new novel.

    I capped off the weekend with a long lane swim at the pool shortly after seven, and the kid tagged along to go to the gym. I zonked me out and I was in bed at a reasonable hour like any middle aged guy who had a busy weekend should be.

  • weekend wrap seven

    There was a taste of smoke in the air all weekend. It has been hot and dry and the province is burning all over the place. You could barely open the window without catching a whiff of char outside. 

    This past weekend looked something like…

    Fridey evening we multi-car-tripped over to the high school for the Kid’s final improv club home show. It was sparsely attended because of the hockey playoffs, but the parents who were there were definitely lamenting the end of an era in our offspring’s theatre careers. 

    The Kid herself bundled up in a van with a few of her friends right from the high school parking lot and dashed off to the wilderness for a weekend of post-graduation camping and river tubing, leaving her poor parents with a taste of imminent empty nest syndrome.

    We filled our Saturday with some errands, making one of our rare trips over to West Edmonton Mall for some light shopping and then down to Burbon Street and into an excellent taco restaurant for lunch. The made-table-side guac  was divine.

    Somewhere in the mix we walked over to the local cafe for chai lattes, but mostly we chilled and napped and chilled some more for the rest of the day—and wrapped up season one of a show we’ve been watching before basically falling asleep on the couch.

    Sunday morning I joined the usual run routine, logging not quite eight klicks in the fire smokey air, and joining the crew for coffee afterwards.

    I did a bit of yard work, watered a few things after a week of rainless skies, and set up in my chair in the shade to read for about an hour.

    Then we dodged off to a local pizza place. Annually on June 8 we celebrate the move-in anniversary to our house—a day on which we ate our first meal of a communal pizza delivered there with all the folks who helped us move in—by eating pizza. Sunday was the twentieth anniversary of that move-in, so we got some classy pizza at the place over in the strip mall by the grocery store.

    I spent the rest of the evening fighting ants that have laid claim to the plum tree in my front yard and who are starting to do actually noticable damage. It might be a losing battle, but I know better than to give up on day one—even though the flower bed fought back and gave me a splinter in my heel. Serves me right, I suppose, for going to war in bare feet.

  • raising calvin

    I grew up on a steady diet of Calvin & Hobbes. 

    The still-famous cartoon strip by Bill Watterson was a fixture in our local newspaper during the entirety of my teenage existence, one of the sole reasons I read the paper that I delivered door to door, clipping out my favourite strips and then later buying the collections in multiple formats of increasingly crisply bound volumes. You could say it was formative for me, and that would be an understatement by a mile.

    The Kid graduated from high school this week and tho they were not allowed to decorate or bedazzle their gowns, they were given free passes to flare up their mortarboard caps.  She spent a whole evening in the basement and emerged later that night proudly showing off a collage affixed to the top of her cap: it was a collection of Calvin & Hobbes comic strips, arranged and glued to her lid, spattered artfully with colour and sparkles, and ready for a quick stroll across the diploma stage.

    This was not a surprise to anyone who knows her.

    To lay claim to some kind of parenting methodology that led us to this moment, my daughter walking across her graduation threshold literally wearing a comic strip that went out of print more than a decade before she was  born, that would be foolish of me. I mean it’s simple, really. She likes Calvin & Hobbes because (a) it’s a great and timeless cartoon, (b) I had numerous copies in the house, and (c) I read them to her frequently until she could read them on her own and then she read them frequently.

    Then, too, don’t forget that I even drew my own comic strip for a few years and you would not be the least bit surprised to read that one of my major influences for that effort was Calvin & Hobbes.

    That influence, it swirled through the rooms of our house for decades.

    Now, maybe it is that I may have internalized some of the lessons of a comic strips character who I adored because, truth be told, I was nothing like him growing up. Calvin was defiant of authority in a way that I could never muster. Calvin was wise and deep and whip smart with a purpose that I merely aspired towards. Calvin brought everything to a life lived with existential abandon that defied everything I understood about the metaphorical box in which I was raised and out of which I feared to step out. Deep down I knew that I was not Calvin, but that not just maybe, certainly, there was something aspirational in that defiant little character and his life of epic adventure and freedom.

    As we were driving home from the ceremony, I racing to get her back to the house so she could dress for prom, she was holding her cap in her hand and she turns to me and says something like “You know why I put this on my cap, don’t you? I’m basically Calvin, you know that right, Dad? You raised me to turn into Calvin.”

    And what does that even mean? Are you a mischievous troublemaker? Are you a socially misaligned youth? Or are you a creative soul unbound by rules? A philosophical genius wise beyond her years? A dramatic soul unleashed by existential undercurrents? Or maybe a bit of everything all rolled into one?

    Calvin & Hobbes was formative for me because while I was not Calvin, then too I could pretend to be that guy, act the part, read the strips and embody the spirit of this quirky kid, not so much unlike a neurotic rule-following father-figure guy in not but a mask and striped shirt.  But whatever I made of myself, there could be a chance—a risk—an epic possibility that I influenced something else. Did I actually parent my own Calvin into being?

    Formative, indeed. Formative squared. 

  • one foot out of the nest

    I’m sitting here in a cafe watching out the window as a parade of goslings march across the parking lot let by a gaggle of parent geese.  They navigate the mostly empty asphalt in front of a not-open-at-8am restaurant, and then a couple minutes later are dashing out onto the main drive holding up the cars and trucks on their morning commute out of the neighbourhood.

    It is an apt metaphor for the last twenty-four hours of my life, I realize.

    Yesterday evening we attended the first of two granduation commencement ceremonies for The Kid who will be—is—already technically has graduated high school this year.

    The first ceremony, the one last night, was a smaller and more intimate affair  with just the hundred or so kids who successfully completed the language immersion program and will be graduating next week with a French diploma.

    There were tearful parents, thousands of photos, cake, silliness, and congratulatory handshakes. 

    We’ll repeat it next week on a larger scale will the full class, but the fun one—the one where I knew enough of the kids who had been through all thirteen years of school, the one with the gaggle of parents were a big group of familiar faces from years of field trips, sleepovers, birthday parties, drop offs, pick ups, and on and on and on—that one is blip, and done.

    I’ve been thinking a bunch about parenting lately. I mean, for about five years, tho lost to the buried archives of time and privacy those articles are long gone, I actually wrote a parenting blog. It was not an advice blog. It was a reflective, parenting philosophy blog. It took me down some interesting paths of thought and ideas and implementation of both. If only I could go back in time and tell the guy writing that blog that simply overthinking all those ideas was worth it in the end.

    And then I wrote a parenting blog of another kind. For a couple of years I posted a weekly comic strip over at www.piday.ca which was me drawing art and making commentary on the trials and troubles of being a dad to a kid who was about ten years old when I created them. I literally just spent a few hours over the last week restoring all those comic strips to a new website and in doing so re-read every single one making me wonder why I ever quit making them. They were not great, but they were pretty good.

    In a week that same kid will be graduated.

    In mere months that same kid will cease to be a kid—in as much as she will be able to vote, buy booze and make decisions for herself.

    I definitely know that parenting never really ends, but this week… this month… this summer is definitely a major milestone in my parenting journey, maybe as consequential as I remember feeling about this time eighteen years ago.

    Those little geese will be off and out of the nest in a month or two. And then the parents can get back to doing whatever they do best—pooping in the grass and squwacking at bikes and honking at five in the morning as they take off into flight.  I feel you, you angry birds, I feel you.