Here is Rowan’s artistic interpretation of his recent camping trip:

In the middle, you will observe a tent with three smiling stick figures inside: the two little ones are Rowan and Isaac, and the bigger one, natch, is Rachel. Off to the right, in his own little tent, is Rob-the-donor. If you look closely, you can just make out what he’s thinking:

At the top is the requisite kindergarten-grade sun. To the right is Lake Superior, clear and warm, shallow for miles in under the August sky.

But, you’re thinking to yourself, someone is missing. Susan, where are you?

Guess.

Maybe you have been eaten by a bear? Perhaps you are visiting the Portapotty? Trying to patch the slow leak in the air mattress?

No, no, and no.

Oh.

Maybe, then, you are soaking commando in a hot tub underneath the stars before taking yourself off for ice cream and to see a late showing of The Kids Are All Right — which did, after all, come to Thunder Bay! Later, maybe you slept in, and then woke up to do yoga before settling in for a morning of quietly reading the manuscript of your novel-in-progress. After which, maybe you went for a long walk, picked some raspberries, returned home to finish your readthrough, and then went out for a long-overdue dinner with a friend. Maybe you ate slow-cooked ribs and gumbo and jambalaya. Maybe you read your girl friend’s copy of the third Stieg Larsson novel in bed and then slept, uninterrupted by partiers in the next campground over or a shrieking baby in the next tent or your own three-year-old son, who never quite settled and hopped from Thermarest to Thermarest every two hours through the night. Maybe you woke up to do more yoga and plot out the events of your novel on a spreadsheet before making gazpacho and pasta with tomatoes, cucumbers, chard, and parsley from your very own garden, ready for your sunsoaked family when they returned after their 48 hours away from you. Maybe you all watched The Empire Strikes Back together when they got home.

Bingo.

Maybe you missed them.

Maybe.

For what may seem like obvious reasons, we don’t do a lot of fatherhood over here at Mama Non Grata. We have nothing against fathers, but in a two-mom household, they just don’t get the same airplay. Those of you who are regular readers of this blog know that a certain amount of posts, usually the ones that make people cry, are devoted to my mother, who merits her own tag. My dad — who is en route to Thunder Bay as I type this — has tended to play a supporting role.

But make no mistake about it, people: people win Oscars for supporting roles. And the fathers in my life are some serious contenders.

There’s Rob, who breaks out in hivestimes when the word “father” is used, although that doesn’t stop Rowan from testing out the word “dad” every so often. “This is my dad, Rob,” he’ll announce to anyone in the vicinity whenever Rob visits — every six to eight weeks, each December and March break, any stopovers he can finagle on other travels, month-long stays each summer. It’s not clear to me that Rowan understand entirely what “dad” means — during one of Rob’s last visits, he asked, dreamy-like, “Rob, do you have any kids?” And when Rob said, “Um, yes. Yes I do,” Rowan asked, “Are they big kids or little kids?” But it’s a name for someone special in his life, someone who shows up, as Rob does, dependably, regularly, constantly. Rob is not a 24/7 parent, but he is, increasingly, a parent, if an occasional one — someone who can be counted on to care for, to jump in and play chase, wipe a nose or a butt, make or clean up dinner, or babysit the kids for four days while their mothers go to New York City. They had a blast, apparently — I returned home to a tidy house, dinner in the crockpot, mostly unfazed children, and the ultimate parental backhanded compliment: My first evening home, Rob looked perturbed as Rowan and Isaac engaged in their usual pre-bed squawking and tussling. “They’re rangy tonight,” he said. “They’re always like this,” I replied. “Interesting,” he said: “They weren’t like this with me.”

I forgave him, though, because, well, getting to go to New York was huge — huge because I got to launch my book (more on that soon), huge because Rachel and I got to visit one of my favourite cities in the world, huge because we got to go to that city without our kids and know that they were happy, huge because it’s precedent-setting: we can go away AGAIN. Further away. For longer. Even as we mused on how much fun it would be to take the kids to Manhattan, New York was exhilarating because it marked the beginning of a new sort of freedom for us as parents: the freedom to not parent, for days on end, to be grownups not in charge of anyone but our own selves. Freedom to read a magazine in an airport lounge and then sleep on the airplane. To drink champagne on a rooftop before dinner, then go to bed at 1 AM, and not worry about having to get up the next morning.

New York was also exhilarating because my dad — proud Papa — showed up, unannounced, at my book launch. He flew in from Toronto, camera in tow, to surprise me, sprung for dinner at Prune — with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain at the next table, no less! — and then flew home again, only to prepare to drive up north to help us celebrate Isaac’s birthday. Because, twice a year, my dad and his wife show up, unfailingly, with suitcases full of presents and bagels, for the boys’ birthdays. They also make it possible for us to fly south to see them — to Toronto and, for the past couple of years, to Florida.

So, the fathers in my life don’t see me or my sons daily, or even weekly, but they are a constant presence in our lives. They support, in every sense of that word: strong, dependable, helping us to hold up and nurture ourselves and each other. And for this, they occupy an unparalleled place in our hearts. And for this, we love them.

The car is aging.

I mean that, of course, in the sense that the car is — like the rest of us — getting older. But I also mean that the car ages me. As in, I gain a couple of decades whenever I slide behind the wheel of our late-model, Big-Three sedan. It is — and I use this term fondly — a dad car, a car your father might drive, a car my father did drive for several years before upgrading and generously bequeathing it to us.

All my cars, actually, with the exception of the Chevy Cavalier my brother and I shared for two weeks one summer in our teens before it was stolen out of our driveway one night and later found on the outskirts of town with vomit and heroin works in the backseat, have been dad cars: the Pontiac something or other, the Cadillac Sedan Deville, the Dodge Intrepid, and now our current beast. The running theme, of course, has been the price. For me, “free” tends to trump “pride” when it comes to vehicles: if the price I have to pay for not going into hock over a car is that people assume that the carseats in the back are for my grandchildren, well, then, that’s fine with me. Our current car is popular with the seniors here in Thunder Bay. People tend to do a double take when they see me behind the wheel. “But she’s too young,” they must be thinking. “Hi Gramps!” my friend Daphne calls whenever I drive by. My friend Jody giggles whenever she sees it. “It just doesn’t … fit … with the rest of you,” she said once, and I wanted to hug her. (Or maybe hit her.) She, of course, drives a Harley. (Or is that “rides”?)

Still, I have a soft spot for our eleven-year-old car, partly because my mother also drove it. I can still picture her behind the wheel, faintly remember conversations we had while driving, and imagine she’d get a kick out of seeing me drive by, two kids in the back, barking, “Do I need to stop driving or can the two of you stop hitting each other?”

But the car is aging. We are entering, I fear, that period of increasingly rapid automotive decline, where repairs edge out maintenance and visits to the mechanic inch closer and closer together. It’s all the little things: the door to the glove compartment doesn’t close properly; Rowan’s seatbelt gave out last week, forcing us to move his booster seat into the middle (fortunately, he says he likes being next to Isaac, but you know that’s just a chicken fight waiting to happen); the brights don’t stay on unless you hold down the lever; every so often, the driver’s-side windshield wiper takes on a life of its own and whaps around the side of the car to smack the driver’s-side window. The paint is chipping, the shocks are iffy, the electronic locks work only intermittently, you have to hold up the hood with one hand while you check the oil, and the cup holder spring mechanism is busted. That said, it still looks fairly respectable and gets us from A to B without fuss.

There is aging, of course, and there is aging. Time passes by at the same rate for us all, I realize, but my children are growing, developing, becoming stronger, more realized, versions of their own selves. I, on the other hand, like the car, seem to be aging in the sense of getting older, where regular maintenance is designed to slow down the decline rather than actually improve things, where pain moves on a regular sightseeing tour throughout my body: neck, shoulders, wrists, knees, ankles. My forearms are shit. I have vertigo, just like my mother did, and it gets worse every year. I chew cold things only on the left side of my mouth. My lower back hurts. The index fingernail on my right hand is thickening and developing a permanent split. I’m going grey. My vision is still rock solid, but that’s only because I had laser eye surgery four years ago. I may be getting wiser, but I am losing nouns, names, just like they (I forget who) said I would. I can still touch my toes, but I worry that, if I skip a week, I won’t be able to any more.

I am told this is just the beginning.

That said, I  like to think I still look fairly respectable and I can get from A to B without much fuss.

In my head and my heart, I am a Prius girl, or maybe a Subaru Outback or even a Mazda 5 kind of driver. (In my slightly wilder dreams, I’m driving on the coast, any coast, in a red, two-seater, convertible MG.) In my head and my heart, I can stay out all night dancing, type like the wind, squat to pick up my toddler without grimacing as I straighten my knees. In real life, I’m hoping the current car lasts us until Isaac is in school full time and we can shift our child care budget over to car payments.

On Wednesday, I committed the act of flagrant hope and suspension of all parenting values otherwise known as Taking Small Children on International Flights.

Admittedly, the “international” bit meant flying, via Minneapolis, from Fort Lauderdale to Thunder Bay, but still. Ten hours spent in transit with a five-year-old and his toddler sidekick requires concessions to M&M cookies, portable DVD players, rolling around on the floors of public spaces, and an all-you-can-drink apple-juice bar. (Sidenote: is Isaac, at two and a half, still technically a toddler? Is there a name for this age?)

Every time we get on a plane, the nice people in first class smile at the children as they march on board and make jokey comments to us about how we’ve got “some good little travellers there!” And I smile back and say, “Well, we’re planning on leaving them up here with you, if you don’t mind.” And they smile and laugh some more and then we leave them to their quiet, amenities-laden, seats while we go find ours in coach, children in tow.

In absolute truth, the kids are getting easier and easier to travel with. Or maybe it’s that Rachel and I are getting better and better at travelling with them. Or some combination thereof. Whatever it is, Rowan and Isaac are fairly easy to placate with cartoons and a regular supply of treats, and the adults can be fairly certain of at least skimming a magazine article or two (me) or completing a Sudoku (Rachel) in between fielding requests for blankets and escorting small people to washrooms and reading stories and filling sippy cups and explaining why it’s not good to kick the seat in front of you and retrieving dropped Bakugans and making pillows of laps and turning the overhead lights on and off and on and on and on and off. And on.

And off.

So, we get on our first flight of the day, which coincides precisely with Isaac’s naptime, and we have three seats on one side of the plane, and a fourth across the aisle. And it is my turn to sit with the kids. Which I do. Because it is my turn. And I am one of their mothers. And they’re all excited to turn on the DVD player even though they know they have to wait for it and so I spend a half-hour preflight repeating brightly, over and over, “No, not yet! Not until the lady tells us!”

And then I am paged. Passenger Goldberg is paged. And I press my call button, and not one but two flight attendants come to let me know that I have been selected for an upgrade to first class.

FIRST CLASS! With all the people I threatened to leave my kids with. Except, without my kids. But with free booze. Even though it goes against all my principles, I adore first class. The two times in my life I’ve flown it.

And I can’t do it. I mean, even if it wasn’t my turn to sit with the kids, even if I was snugly ensconced across the aisle, I still couldn’t have done it. In my heart of hearts, I know that I would have never in a hundred years forgiven Rachel if she went off to sit in first class and left me with the kids. I know all that, but that doesn’t stop me from harbouring a brief and utterly unrequited longing that she will look up from her Sudoku and smile and wave me off, saying, “Oh, go for it! Have a great time! We’ll be just fine here — no really, go!”

And so I turn down my upgrade to first class for four hours of Flying with Children. Four hours during which Isaac does not nap, not even for a moment, but instead becomes increasingly cranky and winds up screaming, “I want milk! I WANT MILK! You go away!” for the flight’s final half-hour. (When he finally sleeps, it is as the landing gear is released on the runway as we touch down in Thunder Bay; the bump as we hit the tarmac lulls him into an ever deeper slumber that lasts all the way through customs, where we have to explain to the official how, exactly, we are family, but I digress.)

Four hours. Four full hours of my life that I could’ve been in first class. For hours that I will never get back. Not that I’m not trying.

HINI enough for you?

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

We’ve all had our plague over at this end: Rowan came home from a class trip to the play farm exhausted and lethargic and put himself to bed for two days. Rachel coughed approximately twice. Isaac was feverish and snotty and sleepy for a week. As for me, I developed a sudden-onset hacking cough and low-grade fever right on the tail end of the Great, Never-Ending Sinus Infection of 2009. In a fit of denial, I ushered myself into my GP’s office so that she could “rule out bronchitis.” Because, me? I don’t get the flu. The flu is for mere mortals who ACTUALLY LEAVE THEIR HOUSES. Which I, as a self-employed, home-office–based freelancer, prefer not to do. I was genuinely surprised when my doctor showed up in the examining room decked out in a hazmat suit and took my temperature and blood oxygen levels and then handed me a prescription for Tamiflu and a requisition for a chest x-ray. And a mask. I looked at the little blue piece of paper in my hand.

“You mean, like, a chest x-ray in the next few days? Like if things get bad?”

“No,” she said, looking at me as though the flu had affected my brain. Which maybe it had. “I mean a chest x-ray now. Your lungs don’t sound too good.”

I keep forgetting I have children, I guess. Children who are snotty germ magnets. Children who insist upon drinking from your water bottle and licking your cheek and coughing into your face. Children who are only just becoming adept at handwashing and coughing into their elbows. Children who go to school with other children and pick up all their germs. Before I had children, I rarely got sick. But Rowan’s birth seemed to usher in the Age of the Antibiotic, and Isaac’s arrival did nothing to stop it. Life with children seems to be a series of steppingstones from one prescription to the next: bronchitis, ear infections, pinkeye, strep. It’s a wonder we get anything done around here.

And yet, we do. I’d complain more (okay, maybe that would be difficult, but shut up) about the constant sickness, not to mention the other zillion parental things that take up vast swaths of my time and energy, except for the fact that I can’t argue that the children have somehow made me less productive. In the era BC (Before Children), when I — in theory — had all the time in the world to write, I didn’t seem to. But the Age of the Antibiotic seems to have had the side effect of writerly productivity: the novel pages are adding up, a slow series of essays have been accepted (and more than a few rejected), not to mention this blog, which wouldn’t exist without the kids. (Or, if it did, it would be kind of creepy.)

And neither would this book.

Yes, it’s in (Canadian) stores now, and will be in the US come the spring. And, last weekend, Rachel, Rowan, Isaac and I had sufficiently recovered from our viral invasion to get on a plane and fly to Toronto for the official launch of  And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents and Our Unexpected Families.

I’m so glad we did. You know, I spent a lot of my 20s regularly visiting the Toronto Women’s Bookstore — a must for a downtown-dwelling women’s studies major, really. So it was a singular thrill to see my own anthology launched there. As it was to meet for the first time so many of the contributors to the anthology: Mary Bowers (who drove in all the way from Chicago), Annemarie Shrouder, Carrie Elizabeth Wildman, Shira Spector, Dawn Whitwell, Torsten Bernhardt, Marcie Gibson, Erin Sandilands, Jake Szamosi. And some of their kids. Mary and Annemarie brought the house down with fantastic readings. My doting father took lots of pictures.

Mary Bowers, reading from "The D Word"

Annemarie Shrouder, reading from "After Yes"

My coeditor, Chloë Brushwood Rose

And Rachel (who also has an essay in the book, by the way; all you non-bio moms in particular might want to take a look) brought the kids. We were a little concerned that a book launch wasn’t necessarily the best venue for them, but they held their own just fine. Rowan took good advantage of the cookies and juice, capitalizing on the fact that there was little we could do to stop him from availing himself of a sixth Oreo in the middle of someone’s reading. At one point during my reading I looked up, and he had walked down the middle of the aisle to watch me. He stood, smiling, ten feet away, as I told the story of the events and the people leading up to his conception and birth, the complicated and exquisite love that brought him and his brother into the world and that surrounds their lives. He looked at me, smiling, and I looked at him and smiled back as I read, and then, when I looked up again, he had gone, in all likelihood back to the cookie table. 

Me, reading from “Mamas’ baby, Papa’s maybe”

“Susan’s talking now!” he told Rachel. Later, he asked her, “When Susan was talking, was that from the book she made?” he asked Rachel, later. “Yes, she she was,” she told him. And that night, as I put him to bed, he told me, “Congratulations on your book, mom. It’s nice that you made a book about us. I liked the party.”

And then he coughed. Still, it’s also thrilling to know that he’s beginning to get a glimpse into what exactly it is that I do, and how he and his brother are part of it — germs and all.   

Ye gods, people, you have no idea how much shorter an eight-hour drive is with no children in the back seat. The whole way to the Winnipeg Folk Festival, Rachel and I kept marveling at how easy this was: no backseat DJing from the three-year-old dictator, no “Are we there yet?”s, no placating a restless Isaac with chunks of Arrowroot cookie and half-grapes, passed into the backseat at regular intervals. No doling out points for every “motorcycle-go!” passed on the highway. No ending the last leg of every driving interval with a screaming baby whose limits had been pushed past breaking point. No skulking around the sleeping children in a hotel room at 7:30 p.m., only to be wakened by the very same children at 4:34 a.m. So not like last year.

Just me and my girl, on the road with grown-up music and coffee and the cell phone I finally acquiesced to. And oh my God, it was sweet.

Those of you with small children who have not yet gone away for a few days with your partner: do it. If you can swing it at all, do it. Leave them with a trusted somebody and hightail it out of town. It barely matters where. I mean, the Folk Festival was fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but the real highlight of the weekend was not being responsible for anyone else’s needs. From Friday morning — a getaway marred only by Rowan’s sudden tears and pleas for us to stay (he was fine, fine, five minutes later, as we confirmed by said cell phone) — until Monday evening, I did not have to worry about anyone else eating, sleeping, sharing, peeing, hurting, running off, waking up, being bored, throwing sand, or otherwise Behaving or Needing or just plain Existing under my jurisdiction. We travelled with three other sets of parents of relatively small children, none of whom had ever left their kids behind either, and we all walked around with slightly goofy, dazed expressions on our faces. We half-declared a moratorium on conversations that began with, “If the kids were here…,” but eventually gave up. It was just too much fun to gloat.

Even the camping — such as it was, what with nice flat fields of open grass and cooking facilities and bathrooms nearby — was magical. I slept, uninterrupted, under a duvet on our air mattress, until whatever time I chose to wake up in the morning. Our second morning there, Rachel brought a steaming mug of tea to me as a 10:30 wake-up call. And I remembered what it was like to be pampered, how easy it was to be romantic, when not pulled in two directions at once, not mentally mapping out the morning, the hour, how to entice children from Point A to Point B.

And the people! The beautiful people everywhere, eating the beautiful food that we simply bought when we were hungry, washed down by the microbrews in the beer tent when we had a hankering. The baked goods! (Rachel would like me to mention for the record that we ate fried dough in four different forms.) The swimming, the conversations, reading large chunks of my novel, the setting up of camp chairs and hanging out for hours on end in ways that we haven’t hung out in far, far too long.

And, uh, the music. “What did you see?” my sister-in-law asked when we got back. “I don’t actually know,” I admitted. Because, sacrilegious as it sounds to the hard-core festivalgoers, I didn’t really care all that much, at least after k.d. lang cancelled and we missed Elvis Costello and Martha Wainwright on the Wednesday night. Neko Case was pretty rockin’, as was a UK band called Bellowhead. I liked Iron and Wine, and I kind of thought Steven Page was a bit pathetic, what with singing all the old Barenaked Ladies songs he wrote, thank you very much.

But really? As long as it wasn’t Raffi, I wasn’t complaining.

Once upon a time, there were two small boys. And their mothers took them from their small town, where the water was not fluoridated, on a small airplane, to (as the larger of the small boys put it) The Land of Toronto, where for two nights in a row they attended enormous family dinners, during which they ran around like madmen with their cousins and ate untold amounts of sugar and watched cable television shows like American Idol and had vast quantities of fun and fell into bed at 10 p.m. without even brushing their teeth they (and their mothers) were so tired and full of glee.

They also drove all around the Land of Toronto, having adventures that involved dinosaurs and subway trains and mud puddles and several of their mothers’ Old Stomping Grounds. And it was good.

Then they went to The Small Town of Guelph, where they ate untold quantities of chocolate Easter eggs and had large family dinners and ran around like madmen with their cousins and stayed up very late watching (appropriately) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The children, though generally delightful, coped with the travel and the influx of sugar and the lack of sleep and the media by occasionally throwing tantrums in the presence of older relatives and eating lots of cheese strings. Their mothers coped by drinking lots of wine. Mostly, they tried to be good parents, which involved, in part, requiring the small boys to brush their teeth after two nights of not.

They took out the small boys’ toothpaste and toothbrushes, whereupon the small boys’ auntie wondered aloud why the mothers were letting the small boys use fluoridated toothpaste.

The mothers explained that the water in their small town was not fluoridated, and that their family doctor had suggested that they use said toothpaste to compensate.

The auntie again wondered out loud why the mothers were letting the small boys use fluoridated toothpaste.

The mothers again explained that the water in their small town was not fluoridated, and that their family doctor had suggested that they use said toothpaste to compensate.

The auntie again began to wonder out loud why the mothers were letting the small boys use fluoridated toothpaste, but stopped herself midsentence when she realized that she was critiquing other people’s parenting and apologized for doing so.

Just then, the larger of the two small boys walked into the room and, for no apparent reason, bonked the smaller of the two small boys on the head. The smaller boy began to cry. The larger boy left the room.

There followed an uncomfortable silence.

Then the auntie said, “Well, maybe if you didn’t let them use fluoridated toothpaste, they wouldn’t be so violent.”

There’s this meme going around Facebook that asks you to write 25 random things about yourself. I swore I wouldn’t do it because I overshare enough here already. But I thought I’d borrow the format to account for last week’s adventures down south.

1. Toddlers’ eyes and sunscreen do not mix. On two separate occasions, Isaac spent a couple of miserable hours weeping in his stroller and wailing, “Eye! Eye!” We decided to go with longsleeved shirts and pants rather than exposed skin.

2. Northwest Airlines routinely overbooks its Thunder Bay–Minneapolis route. Arrive early, or risk being bumped — as we were — to the next day. At least we got vouchers.

3. Despite their name, sandwiches do not taste better with sand in them.

4. Global Positioning Systems rock, and I will never drive in an unknown city without one again.

5. Our rental car was “upgraded” to a white Chrysler 300 — which ensured that we fit in well with the geriatric populations of Boca Raton. On the plus side, given that I normally drive my parents’ hand-me-down Buick, I felt right at home.

6. Isaac can sit, perfectly content, for hours at a time on the top step of a swimming pool, playing with a cup.

7. Ice cream cures almost anything that ails you.

8. Rowan asked, as we watched planes take off for two hours in the Thunder Bay airport, “Where’s the hill?” “What hill?” we asked. “The one the planes go up up up up…” he explained.

9. A disposable diaper can hold a vast amount of chlorinated water.

10. I have never been on a beach holiday where I cared less about getting a suntan.

11. Boca Raton is a strange, strange place, filled with gated communities and strip malls.

12. Shopping for bathing suits tests many of my feminist principles.

13. My dad and his wife were extraordinarily gracious and generous hosts.

14. Let Rowan press the buttons on the elevator, EVERY TIME.

15. Although I worried that we might get bashed, I also couldn’t resist asking the car rental guy if Rachel really had to pay for the privilege of being a second driver on the car. My exact phrasing: “Even if we live in the same household?” Once he confirmed that we were indeed “on the same insurance policy,” he put her on for free. So, folks, at Avis, the codes for “same-sex couple” are “same household” and “same insurance policy.” Stick that in your Pride parade.

16. I like the idea of shopping at Target better than actually shopping at Target.

17. No theme park beats making sand castles on the beach.

18. When on holiday with small children at your parents’ place, it is vital (or at least recommended) to commiserate and commune with your friends who are also on holiday with their small children at their parents’ place. Go to the zoo. Get the grandparents to babysit. Have dinner out. Drink lots of wine. Go to bed at midnight and get up at 5:30 with your toddler.

19. Although I have a mild phobia around butterflies, I enjoyed walking through the butterfly garden at Gumbo Limbo nature preserve.

20. Isaac climbed all six flights of stairs to the top of the observatory deck at Gumbo Limbo, and then insisted on bumping down the same six flights of stairs on his bum, followed by a horde of impatient 11-year-olds.

21. You never know what will end up on your camera when you hand it to a four-year-old.

22. Isaac is now big enough to go on a carousel horse on the merry-go-round, just like his brother.

23. The best thing about parenting principles is letting so many of them go while on holiday.

24. Isaac literally fell asleep as our return flight to Minneapolis taxied to the gate, after three and a half hours of ridiculous in-flight energy.

25. On our flight home to Thunder Bay, Northwest offered us $400 each in vouchers and hotel accommodations for the night if we would volunteer to fly out the next day. We seriously considered it, but decided we were too exhausted. Both kids slept the entire flight home.

Hey! An entire blog entry, and no need to worry about narrative cohesion. Cool.

So, this guy gets on this train, and he’s settling in with his magazine, when the old man across the aisle starts complaining: “Oy, am I thirsty. Oy, am I thirsty!”

Every 20 or 30 seconds, just as the guy manages to read a couple of sentences, it’s the same thing: “Oy, am I thirsty!”

This goes on for about 20 minutes, with the old man yelling and the guy getting progressively more annoyed, until finally he gets up, walks through three cars to the dining car, gets a huge glass of ice water, carries it back to his car, and hands it to the old man. Who thanks him profusely and drinks the water.

And all is quiet.

And then, just as the guy is really getting into his magazine article, the old man sighs. “Oy, was I thirsty!”

Sometimes, Rowan is kind of like that

I’m thinking in particular of this thing that happened, oh, last May, when we woke him up at 4 a.m. because he and Rachel were catching a 6 a.m. flight to Vancouver, via Winnipeg. We thought she’d just carry him to the waiting taxi and that he would sleep through the first part of the trip.

We were wrong. He threw a huge fit, crying and flailing and going on and on about how he didn’t want to get in a taxi, that he just wanted to go to sleep, in his own bed, and why why why did we wake him up? He didn’t want to go to Vancouver, he didn’t want anything, and no.

Rachel managed to shove him in the cab and eventually get him on the airplane, but he wasn’t really over it until somewhere over the Prairies. And even now, he’s not really over it. Eight months later, we’ll be going about some routine part of the day when will say, “Remember that time you woke me up?”

How could we forget?

I mention this only because next week we are going to Florida — no snowsuits for an entire week! I swear, even if there is a freak blizzard in Florida I will not put snowsuits on those boys — and our return flight leaves at 6:30 a.m.

So, if, sometime next Saturday, very early in the morning, you hear screaming from somewhere in the southern United States, don’t worry. We’ll have it under control.

It is safe to say that Isaac made no lasting friends at the Dryden Best Western. Not that he cares, but one day he’ll realize that waking up screaming at 4:24 a.m. and refusing under any circumstances to go back to sleep will not land you first place in a popularity contest with the people in the rooms on either side of you. To say nothing of the people in the room with you.

But because we are such adaptable, make-lemonade-with-lemons sorts, Rachel and I decided that we might as well take advantage of the early morning to get on the road. And so we packed up the car and the children, hit the Tim Horton’s on the side of the highway, and drove the rest of the way to Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba, Rowan and Isaac conked out in the back seat.

We made good time.

My father just laughed when I told him we had booked a last-minute cottage rental and were driving to the Beach. He is a veteran of many such drives — each summer, my parents hauled the family in our Ford sedan from Toronto to the cottage we shared with my mom’s sister and her family. (Apparently I nearly drowned in a hotel pool in Thunder Bay.) The moms and the kids stayed out all summer, while the dads showed up on weekends or, in the case of my father, for a couple of weeks at the end of the summer. The kids went to Winnipeg Beach Day Camp, the moms kept house and played tennis and picked us up at the end of each day and took us for ice cream and to the beach. At least, that’s what I remember.

Now my aunt and uncle still own the cottage, which they’ve renovated entirely to accommodate the new generation. My cousin Jill spends a month there every summer with her three kids, her husband driving the minivan from Toronto to the beach, and then showing up at the end of the summer for a couple of weeks. My mother’s brother and his family summer in another place, also recently renovated to accommodate their next generation.

And our cottage? Not so much with the renovations. Which was totally fine with me. “It’s been in our family for 90 years,” said the woman renting to us. I loved it because it smells like the Beach, a sort of chlorinated mildew, with a touch of fish fly. I’m guessing they last touched things up circa 1950. I did a little photo essay of the decor, and thought long and hard about the ethics of permanently borrowing the vintage Pyrex cookware and the fabulous three-tiered dainties tray. Even if I bought them replacement bowls at Sears? Come on.

Our second day there, Isaac took his first steps in the kitchen of my aunt’s cottage. He stood, surrounded by cooing, clapping adults, and burst into tears at the sudden attention. Rowan spent hours and hours playing with his second cousins, holed up in the bedroom I used to share with my cousin Jason, who was also visiting that weekend from Toronto. He’s still mad about the time I bit him on the ass when we played puppies. Isaac fell in love with his Great-Auntie Sheila, my mom’s sister, reaching for her and nestling into her arms, lighting up when she walked into the room, sitting on her lap while she fed him bits of cookie. Rowan went to day camp, albeit reluctantly. The camp is smaller now, a sign of the times, now that the moms work, too. The mosquitoes were terrible. We ate lots of ice cream and played on the beach with the cousins.

Our last night there, we went out with a bang at Boardwalk Days, where Rowan went on every ride he could while Isaac, who met no height requirements, screamed in frustration from the stroller until Rachel took him home and put him to bed. I idiotically took Rowan on the pirate ship ride. He loved it, but I almost hurled, and then sat with my head between my knees, trying to recover, while he, oblivious, rode the toy train. Staggering home, I was just starting to wonder if I would make it when old family friends, Sharon and Eddie, drove by and scooped us up and took us back to our “holiday house,” which Rowan keeps calling our “Halloween house.”

I spent every summer at Winnipeg Beach until I was 12, when, wanting to spend time with my own friends, I chose sleep-away camp for eight weeks. Then, bored, disillusioned, I swore I wouldn’t come back.

And then I did, and it was perfect.