Resurfacing

Holy moly, what a week and a half it's been!

I have survived three sick children (of course they all kindly took turns coming down with the illness to stretch out the pain and misery of playing nurse maid to it's maximum), daylight savings time "falling back" and the ongoing gore-fest of our financial horror show. This all complimented with the daily doses of ensuring that my children don’t become mushy-brained TV zombies and trying to find just one more clean pair of underwear in the 6 day-old pile of unfolded laundry on my living room chair. We all survived unscathed to tell the tale, so I am chocking this up as another successful venture in mothering.

I have decided to keep this blog post short and sweet to alleviate the pressure of getting the perfect post out. And once I hit the publish post button, I can move on… most likely over to the couch to nurse the babe, again.

Being Three

I love my children. They are smart and funny and kind and have made my world a better place. Their sweet smiling faces, the way they giggle with each other, the sound of their gentle breathing while they sleep all bring a warmth to my heart that is indescribable. So why is it that they can also drive me nuttier than a squirrel at a coconut convention?

It's a strange experience to love someone so immensely and at the same time want to box them up and ship them off to some remote town in the Himalayas. But truly, I have no one to blame but myself. I knowingly and wantingly brought 3 amazing, but all be it insane, little people into this world. And now I must sleep in the over-crowded, toy-strewn, jelly-stained bed I made.

Currently, it is my three year old who is giving my maternal instincts a kick in the pants. Whoever came up with the term "terrible twos" clearly had their children sent far, far away before said children reached the true terror that is three. My days are filled with "No!", "I wanna do it!", "It's my turn!", "Do it now!" and my personal favourite, "You loose, Stinky Pete!” If I had a quarter for every time my 3 year old gleefully looked me right in the eye as he found a new way to cause my lips to purse in frustration I'd be on a first name basis with my local Starbucks barista (or bartender). It isn’t until you’ve tried to reason with a three year old that you truly come to understand the complexity and subjectivity of truth. It’s almost a philosophical experience when you think about it; almost. Where else outside the halls of academia does one truly get the opportunity to examine the fabric of reality, perception and truth? Was that bite of apple I just had truly his bite? How do I know that the apple is still as good as it was prior to the bite? Isn’t the esthetic reality of an apple lessened by its lack of wholeness? And am I really a poopy-head mommy?

I've read the articles and books that all assure me that this is all perfectly normal, a development stage, a step in the direction of self reliance and discovering his place in the world. I've gone through this once before with my now 5 year old, so I am aware that there will come a time when we are no longer at the mercy of the whims of a logic-impaired Spider-Man-lover with a Napoleon complex. But, oh lordy!

Fair Bananas

Bananas are an important component in the home of small children. Without them there’s no banana bread, banana milk shakes, banana and peanut butter sandwiches and of course the joy of pretending we’re all a family of monkeys in need of a snack. And now I am left wondering what are we really paying for when we buy our bananas?

My much more politically aware husband emailed me a link to a piece done on Democracy Now about the business of growing and distributing bananas. I haven’t looked at a banana the same since. Earlier this year Chiquita Banana, the banana with the tarty fruit-lady sticker, admitted that one of its subsidiaries had paid about $1.5 million to a paramilitary group called United Self-Defense Forces of Columbia (AUC), which also just so happens to be considered a terrorist organization by the US State Department. Why would our friendly neighbourhood banana be paying thugs in Columbia? Well, it seems the AUC were very effective for union busting, terrorizing workers, rounding up and killing organizers of dissention. Bottom line, there’s money in bananas and Chiquita doesn’t want to share (except with terrorists, apparently). I have come to realize that the banana that I grew up with, our popular cereal topping fruit, is an instrument of oppression.

I admit I’d always been aware that the business of growing the likes of bananas and coffee were industries of inequity. I knew that the people who do the actual growing get paid a fraction for what their crop is sold for on the global market by exporters (who make an immense fortune bringing us consumers the products we can’t imagine going through our days without). I buy fare trade, when the opportunity avails itself. But I’d just as likely buy the name brand product at Safeway if I don’t want to make multiple shopping stops. And it occurs to me, why should I have to go out of my way to ensure that my dollar spent is contributing to the world as I’d like to see it work? Why can’t I buy fair trade bananas and coffee at the grocery store across the street from me? In the UK, the large supermarket chain Sainsbury changed to selling only fair trade bananas because of consumer pressure. If there, why not here? Like any business wanting to make money, major grocery store chains just want to sell us what we want to buy. If we directly tell them we want to buy fair trade, it seems to follow that they’d want to carry fair trade products.

So my goal for the week is to write a short note to Safeway and IGA (where we usually do our grocery shopping) asking that they start carrying fair trade bananas and coffee. I’m sure if Safeway and IGA got only my note they’d simply toss it in the recycling bin and not give it much thought. However, there is a magic number of letters received that will cause the grocery store decision makers to take notice. I don’t know what that number is, but I’d sure like to find out. And until I can simply buy fair trade bananas at my local supermarket, I’ll make the extra effort to shop at the stores that carry fair trade.

Catching Up

I never got a Halloween post out. I’d intended to describe the insanity of my afternoon trying to keep my children from killing each other during their manic ride to the highly anticipated after-dinner trick-or-treat time. I so wanted to get something out there about how cute my boys were (they were Death and Robin, by the way), and how amazingly heart warming Halloween has become as an event to be shared as a family. But like many things on my way-to-busy mommy agenda, it never happened.

I spent the day after Halloween recuperating. The boys didn't have school and we spent the day coming down from the evening’s festivities, eating way too much candy and general after-holiday hyperness. Then came Friday, then all of a sudden it's Saturday and blogging about the goings on of an event that was 3 days ago became forced. Man, cyberspace moves fast. Or perhaps it’s my life that's charging along at breakneck speed.

If I'm going to write about what is happening for me now I would have to talk about my stumblings into the world of cloth diapers. We did use cloth diapers with the boys, but in the eyes of true cloth diaper users we were cloth diaper cheaters; we used a service both times. But not this go-around. Oh no, this time, with my third and last babe, I decided to join in with those proud cloth diapering mommas and earn my environmentally conscious mommy badge and really cloth diaper. That means buying into a whole system that involves liners, and pockets and folds and snaps and covers. Truly, an engineering marvel. Predictably, I could go on and on about the immense cloth diaper culture that is out there. There are women who create and sew intricate and stunning diapers with embroidery and hand dyed fabric for other women's babies to poop in. Cyber cat-fights break out at various on-line malls as intelligent, caring, and normally sane women virtually elbow each other to the front of the check out line to get the cloth diaper they've deemed to be good enough for their sweet babe's little bum. Of course, the vast majority of cloth diaper users are simply people who prefer to use a more environmentally friendly means of keeping pee and poop off the furniture. Disposable diapers are choking our landfills and wasting irreplaceable resources, don’t ‘cha know.

Wanting to lessen the constant nagging guilt all we educated middle class types suffer from, my husband and I want to use cloth diapers, and I want to get excited about them. Really I do. The flat cotton cloth diapers of my infanthood are still used, but the real cloths diapering passion lies with the cloth diapers that are shaped, fitted, and are surprisingly attractive. These high-end human waste containers aren’t as straight forward to use as your standard issue Pampers. After an exasperated call to a good friend I was made aware that I was leaving out the all too important diaper cover step (that’s what truly keeps the dry side dry). I am sure there will be more exasperated phone calls to be made in the near future, and I’ve yet to catch the cloth diapering shopping/collecting bug, but at least I get to go to bed tonight with the self-satisfaction of someone whose done a good, earth-friendly deed today.