here in my head

My brother, his wife and their daughter were up for the weekend which meant I got to spend the weekend playing with my niece, which was bliss. Spending time with a baby is good for the soul. She’s not yet 9 months, but she scales stairs like a pro. She has the world’s most beautiful grin and getting her to smile is one of the best rewards ever. I have never loved someone so much – I can’t imagine what it will be like if and when I have my own, what that love might be like…

I love spending time with my family. I love getting to know my brother as a father, seeing him with his daughter that looks so much like him. And the news this week, that I can finally announce, is that he’ll be a daddy again, times two. He and my sister-in-law are expecting twins. In April. I don’t envy them the challenge of having three babies in diapers, three babies under the age of one and a half. But I do envy, in a way, their fertility. The ease with which they seem to get pregnant. Lucky them.

Spending the weekend with family was a nice change from my weekends of late – no packing! Of course, the rest of the week will be spent in a frenzy of packing to get read for moving next Monday. I don’t know if I’ve fully wrapped my head around the whole “I’m moving” thing and that my dream house will be my house in just one week from tomorrow… It’s pretty amazing to me how, sometimes, things you want, really do happen. I need to keep remembering that from time to time. If you believe it will happen, and you trust that it will, sometimes, it really does…

Tell people you’re moving from the suburbs because you bought a house downtown, and you get many varied reactions. Mostly, from firends and family, reactions are positive, excited, happy for us, as this is something we have wanted for a while and didn’t think we could make happen for at least another 3-5 years. However, from the majority of people I tell, who are not friends or family, but rather aquantances or work colleagues, the assumption seems to be that because we have bought a house downtown, that means we don’t want kids.

“Oooh, I’d love to live downtown, but I have kids,” was one comment. And when I mentioned that we hoped to have kids in the near future, and raise them in this new house, this was the response:

*horrified face* “You can’t raise children downtown! You’ll move back to the suburbs once you’ve had kids. You’ll see.”

Comments said to me have ranged from “BUT YOU LIVE IN ORLEANS!” (because, apparently once you live in one part of the city, you never move? Or because Orleans is amazing and why would we want to leave? I assure you, it is not…), to “Must be nice to be a DINK” (I’m assuming he ment Double-Income-No-Kids, but you never know…), to (and this is my favourite) “Why would you move from the suburbs when you’re in your prime child-baring years?”

I’m not quite sure when living downtown and having children became mutually exculsive. I’m pretty sure it’s not. We’ve bought an end unit of a 90+-year-old row of four townhouses. Every other couple in the row have young kids. There is a park directly across from my house. There is a community centre kitty corner to my house. There is a school across the park. Sounds pretty ideal to me. Heck, we’ll be closer to a park and a school than we were in the suburbs.

It seems, however, that as a society we have a vision of the suburbs as a safe haven, where the lawns are always green, and the neighbours always friendly, and the children always safe. As if by moving to the outskirts of the city, we make ourselves safer and more secure. And yet, we have to bundle the kids up in car seats in our SUVs or mini vans to take them anywhere, even around the corner to the grocery store, because the streets lack sidewalks and the parking lots of the big box stores are a nightmare for a pedestrian, let alone a stroller. Suburban garages that are big enough to fit both our stuff and our cars mean that, unless we make an effort, we might never have to go outside to speak to neighbours, or even see them – rather we can drive into the garage and close the door before we even exit our vehicles – only increasing our isolation, rather than facilitating friendship.

Downtown, I will have a fresh, farmers market mere blocks away, two grocery stores within walking distance, and sidewalks to get me there. We have no garage in this new place. We’ve already met our neighbours, and we haven’t even moved in yet.

Not to say that suburbs are all bad – far from it. The suburbs provided a house that was affordable when we were first starting out. We’ve made some good friends in our neighbours, people we will miss when we move. For some people, the suburbs are ideal. But it’s not where we want to stay, and it’s not where we want to raise our family. We want to be in an area where everything we could want is in walking distance, where you don’t have to spend an hour on the bus to get anywhere, where we don’t have to bundle our kids into the car just to enjoy so much of what Ottawa has to offer – the canal, winterlude, the museums, the parks, the market. And, most importantly, instead of an hour on the bus to get home from work every night, I will have a half-hour walk. Which will give me more time with my kids, when I do have them. And that? That in itself, for me, is a good enough reason to move…

I was walking home along Innes this afternoon when I looked down and saw a dead kitty cat lying by the side of the sidewalk. Poor kitty. Poor kitty’s family who is probably wondering where he/she has gone…Made me miss my kitties who are staying with my parents while we sell/pack/move. They are “vacationing” as Mike puts it. “Shared custody” as my Mom puts it. “When are you taking those darn cats back” as my dad puts it. My father is not a huge fan of the cats.

It’s been a busy week – a wonderful week off from work, haven’t missed the job at all. The long weekend at the cabin was bliss – four days with nothing to do but sleep all afternoon, take long walks by the lake, sit with a drink on the dock with friends and play with their almost 9-month-old. I loved it. And there is no running water at the cabin, so that is saying a lot…

Then it was home to pack, pack, pack. I went through all my thousands of books (I’m not exaggerating…) and whittled the number we’re moving down to half. There is simply not room at the new place. Sure, we could have bought a house in the suburbs and dedicated a room to my vast collection of books in the home library I’ve always dreamt of, but I’d rather be able to walk to work. And, besides, they have these nifty little things called ebook readers that allow you to borrow electronic books from the library that return themselves (which has always been my biggest problem with library books – remembering to return them). So, perhaps, I will not need to buy so many books in the future…

We had a garage sale yesterday and sold most of the stuff we don’t have room for at the new place – the 17′ ladder, the lawn mower, etc., etc., etc. I’ve never had a garage sale before, nor have I really gone to many before – they attract some interesting people. People who will fight with you over a dollar for a two-dollar bag of pens, for example. (100 multi-coloured pens, bought for the wedding last year, spent $24, selling for $2, and yet the woman threatened me when I told her she couldn’t have it for $1. Right…) It was good to get rid of some stuff we don’t want or need any longer, and make a little money in the process, but I don’t think I’ll be having another garage sale anytime soon. But, for now, it makes things easier, because…

We move in three weeks! Three weeks! Three weeks until this kitchen is mine!

Granted, it’ll still be a few weeks after that before we’re fully moved in – we have a few weeks worth of electrical re-wiring that needs to be done before we can really move in. The joys of buying a 90-plus-year-old home. Luckily, our weeks of homelessness coincide with a trip my in-laws are taking to visit family overseas…so we will be living in their basement, much like we did this winter over the course of the bus strike. But this time, without them there for most of it, which makes it infinitely better. I love my in-laws. I do. But living with them is a challenge. Just like moving back home would be a challenge. Living anywhere that isn’t your space is never as nice as being home.

But for now, we still have three weeks here, in this house that has been our home for the last five years. I will miss our gigantic basement, and our gigantic bedroom. And our ensuite. And our powder room. Having only one bathroom will be an adjustment. As will having only one closet in the bedroom. Our whole co-habitating life together has been made so much easier by the fact that we have always had his and her closets. Having his shirts rubbing elbows with mine will be weird…But we will have the market mear steps away – fresh produce in the summer, a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker within spitting distance, and I will never have to suffer the commute to work on the 35 bus again! Also, our house is freakin’ fantastic. (See kitchen picture above…)

And, now that I’ve rambled on without any real point, (and, incidentally, finished the bottle of wine I opened to cook dinner with tonight…), I will sign off. A post with no real direction or purpose – I’m back blogging world. Watch out!

So, me? I am a very bad blogger…And, I’ve decided I’m okay with that, at least for the moment, and that I’d rather go with the ebb and flow of my creative impulses rather than fight them. I’ve not been feeling like expressing myself in words lately, but rather visually, or musically instead. I’ve been playing the piano (well, my little keyboard masqurading as a piano) again, sketching and doodling again, all the while, ignoring the blog. I could blame the stress of selling the house, and buying a new one (we move in a month – a MONTH! I will live downtown in just one month’s time!!!!), and that would not be entirely invalid – it was all consuming to our spare time, the search for a new home and the keeping our current home pristine – but in truth, I haven’t wanted to write. Or even read all that much – I stopped visitng all but a few blogs. My head was not in the blogosphere. Until recently – recently I’ve been feeling the pull, the call of the blog, of writing once again. So we’ll see where this leads.

Except, today, I start a vacation from technology for the next few days. My timing is impeccable.