Growth spurt.

When I was busy blinking, the fourteen-year-old boy grew. Again.

Looks like we're going to have to go shopping for some back-to-school clothes. Should I get two sizes larger than he needs?

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New baby.

I miss having a new baby. Part of surfing midlife is leaving all that behind, I guess, but I still remember how much fun it was.

My nose was always buried in them, I was always breathing them in, always gazing at them, as if I could somehow freeze time and live in a perfect moment forever. I felt like I could never get enough of them.

What were your most precious moments with your new baby?

These drawings first appeared on World Moms Blog.

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I will BConnected.

Mostly I draw stories but sometimes I do speaking. I tell the stories that I've drawn and show some animation and stuff. Next weekend, I shall sally forth to do just that at the BConnected Conference in Ottawa.

BConnected is Canada's first social media and networking conference targeting mom and dad bloggers. I'll be talking about creating empathy in blogging to make a human connection. Naturally I'll incorporate some of my playful and poignant parenting stories to illustrate. I'm planning on making it a very fun (and also deeply meaningful) session.

For those of you in or near Ottawa, I'd love to see you at the National Arts Centre - there's some wonderful speakers at the event Saturday and Sunday April 12th - 13th, 2014. I'll be doing my thing on Sunday morning at 10:30.

Please share this and I will be your best friend.

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Bossy.

I've been called bossy my whole life. I usually shrugged it off as just another word used by my brothers to try to belittle me. Which it never did. I knew what I wanted and was saying it out loud. Being bossy was a good thing when I was a kid.

Only once did this word bring me down, when I was in my early twenties. One of my girlfriends told me I was "bossy". She hurled the word at me in an argument and it stopped me in my tracks. Afterwards, thoughtful, I went out with a male friend, who happened to be in the military.

"Steve...do you think I'm bossy?" I asked him.

"JC," he said, looking right at me, "You have leadership qualities."

"Ok. So then I am bossy."

*     *     *     *     *

I've been reading some chatter on the Innerwebs around this word lately. Last night, I was putting my son to bed, and we snuggled (yes, he's fourteen and still wants to snuggle sometimes) and mused about life. I decided to ask his opinion.

"Boy....do you think I'm bossy?" I asked him.

He said, "YEAH MOM. You are SO bossy!!"

"What do I say or do that's bossy?"

"Mawwwm! You say, (high-pitched lady voice) "Start your homework, come help with the dishes, clean up your room, eat properly!" GEEZ it's so annoying!"

"Okay. So then I am bossy."

I smiled. I'm alright with this.

What do you think of the word "bossy"?

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Bruise Pride.

What is it about teenagers and their injuries? They show off their bruises like trophies, a testimonial to their survival, thus far, of life's hurlings...

Do not run out of Arnicare gel; especially if you have kids. Or if you're accident-proned.

Arnicare helps bruises heal quickly. So the bruise-pride soon turns into "look how fast this went away" pride.

Lately, The Huz has been wading into MineCraft with the 14 year old boy. Sometimes I can hear them shouting to each other...

"AAAGH! Help! There's zombies!! What do I do??!?"

"TP to me Dad! Teepee to me now!!"

"AAAAAAAGH I'M GOING TO DIE! HELP ME HELP ME HEEEEEEELP MEEEEEEE!!"

"Sorry Dad, I can't help you. You're just going to have to die."

I'm not sure Arnicare works on egos.

Heads up! Boiron Canada and Boiron USA  sponsored the blog-tour for my book, The LAST Snowman, and that was super nice of them. 

What are your "miraculous healing" stories?

PS. The Huz says he's not actually worried about getting eaten by zombies in MineCraft.

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I am Santa.

SPOILER ALERT: Don't show this to your kids if they still believe. 

Usually I'm too busy to contribute to Neil's Annual Blogger Christmahanukwanzaakah Online Holiday Concerts, and this year is no exception. But last night, at around 11 PM, I thought I'd throw some animation together with this Christmas lullaby I wrote for my kids when they were little.

Yeah, I was thinking maybe just a couple of drawings...but when I next looked up from my animation, it was 6 o'clock in the morning. Oopsies.

Guys, I did it again.

The song is called "I am Santa" and it riffs off the idea that these kids are supposed to be good in order to get treats. By the way, I subscribe to the philosophy that people should just be good, period. Parenting is hard. It's hard to teach little people how to be good. It's hard to watch them grow up and not need you anymore...

When I wrote this song, my daughters were eight and eleven years old, so they already had inklings about Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. But my son was only five and even though he sang along with a big smile whenever I played it, he didn't actually figure out what it was about until he was ten.



Uh.... now I'm nervous. Because it's just a dinky little acoustic recording. But whatever, it's from the heart and the thirteen-year-old boy loved it. So this is for him.

For a splendid array of seasonal spirit, songs, poems and videos by real authentic actual people, go see Neil's Eight Annual Blogger Christmahanukwanzaakah Online Holiday Concert, CitizenoftheMonth. It's one of the best blogs out there, at any time of year, and I'm not just saying that.

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The BROW Crease.

Kick, kick, kick.

Every time I lay supine the baby growing inside me would wake up. I rolled onto my side and put my hand where I imagined her feet to be. One more month and I would be holding this new little person in my arms.

First babies are game changers. There's a dawning realization that you must now care for another being completely. Eight months into my pregnancy, I looked in the mirror and I noticed something that wasn't there before.

It was...a line.

Just a tiny vertical line nestled between my eyebrows.

About 2 months after my first child was born, I suffered post-natal depression. This manifested as morbid intrusions, where I would imagine some disaster befalling us, like a bomb or a house fire, from which I'd have to save my baby. 

Those episodes were debilitating, they froze me in my tracks, kept me from sleeping, and eating...I was sick.  But my baby thrived in real life.

The line between my eyebrows deepened into a crease.

It took a few years but eventually I recovered from the post-natal depression. With each of my subsequent children, my brow crease became more visible. 

The midnight barfs, the public temper-tantrums, the watching them break-away and get on that yellow school bus without me; all this intensified the crease. 

I began to accept it as a part of my face. 

And now, at just over half a century of my life well lived, I gaze in wonder at these three opinionated and promising teenagers. 

The eldest, who once kicked me so relentlessly in utero, now blows me kisses as she leaves for University. 

The second child, who flung herself around the supermarket floor as a toddler, now dances around the kitchen singing as we cook dinner. 

The third and youngest, our son, who scared us half to death when he fell from the treehouse and fractured his skull in grade 1, now draws endless variations of Spiderman, his tongue poking out in concentration as he sketches.

Each day I pause to look at my reflection, and I know I'm aging. 

My silver streaks brushed up and away from my forehead, the lines and wrinkles sprout out of control.  

I will never again be unfettered and smooth; the bloom of youth has abandoned me. But it doesn't bother me to see it...

...because my brow crease tells everyone the story of how much I care.

And that makes me smile. My life is written all over my face.

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Ford Nation.

Meanwhile, in a park in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke...

Mayor Rob Ford claims he stands up for the "little guy". But the average little guy in Ford Nation doesn't actually do crack.

My kids wanted to know what was wrong with this strange man. They really can't understand why he's still the mayor of Toronto, where their cousins live. I explained that, yeah he's got a lot of problems that make him act that way, and yeah, it's not fair for all the people who live there, and yeah, the way the city's government works, they can't actually make him leave. And yeah, he's a really good example of what not to be.

The kids suggested everyone should just ignore him; but I pointed out that some people still want him to be mayor.

"But why, mum?"

Maybe they want to hope? I have trouble understanding it myself.

How do you explain something like this to kids?

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Sketchy memories.

I was hunting for a lost poem today, looking through my old journals, diaries and sketchbooks. I found this one little book from 2002 with drawings of my kids, and little notes about them. It brought me back in a way that no photograph can.

The eldest daughter was nearly eight. She was always practicing her violin.

She was a tiny little person. Small but perfectly formed.

It's hard to believe she's now nineteen and going to University.

And this daughter was only five at the time.

Even then she was fastidious about her clothes; everything had to be fancy, velvet, sparkley or shiny. She's still got definite ideas about fashion now that she's sixteen.

Children move a lot, and ink on paper is unforgiving. See how I noted my error of proportions on her face?

This was my son, at two. He was a jolly little fellow!

I was going to clean up the pages a little in Photoshop, because you can see right through them to the writing on the other side. But I decided to just leave it...after all, it's only a sketchbook.

The Huz, in a quiet moment.

I loved to watch my children. I felt that if I could fill my eyes up with them, I'd never forget the joy they gave me.

So many memories.

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Back to school.

My youngest child is thirteen years old and going into Grade 8. He wasn't too stressed about today being the first day back to school. The boy asked me to walk him "halfway" there.

I decided to take the dog with us.

And he was off...

I watched him until he disappeared, half hoping he would turn to wave. He didn't.

Motherhood? It's all about letting go. You gotta keep cutting that umbilical cord, over and over and over. I'm so glad I brought the dog with me.

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ZOMBIE Mom.

Patty Sullivan on Twitter asked me if I'd do a drawing of a Zombie Mom for a project she was working on. I'd already done a series on Zombie Appliances and I thought a parody of The Evolution of Man would be hilarious as The Evolution of Zombie Mom.

Just before Mother's Day I started thinking it would be really fun to animate the Zombie Mom evolving. The phased degeneration of the walk-cycle appealed to me as an animator. Then the 13 year old boy came down with a pretty horrifying case of stomach flu and kept me up all night all week with the barfs. This literally brought me back to my early daze as a mother and I found myself moaning, lurching and craving brains.

Needless to say I was too "undead" to get the animation together for Mother's Day. BUT I think this will work in my favor because while Mother's Day only comes once a year, ZOMBIE Mom's Day is, let's face it, every single one of those other 364 days.

So tadaaa, here's my video:



Zombies are fun to draw. Up til now I've only been an animator. Now....I'm a re-animator. Ha.

If you feel like the walking dead because of a child in your life, Zombie-moms.com is for you. Patty Sullivan and some friends put together this site where sleep-deprived parents can go for advice, support and stories. Jump into their tweetstream on the #ZombieMoms hashtag.

Irony: I was so out of it I didn't notice that the Patty I've been emailing about zombies is THE Patty from Kids' CBC. Yeah, she's an award winning tv broadcaster and bonafide celeb and my kids adored her. How did I not realize it was her?? I blame the zombie virus.

Happy ZOMBIE Mom's Day!! What's the most undead thing you've done as a parent?

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