Danka's World

Yesterday was what I call a balanced day. It began with a 5k run and ended with a cup of coffee and a slice of ganache torte from Milestones with my Mom. That is a good balance!

My life feels balanced right now, and yet it feels like it is teetering. It could so easily tip and fall in any direction. What is the point of balance anyway? What is a balanced life? Is balance even good? Or should one just forget about it and go hard in one direction or another? Who knows.

This blog feels unbalanced because it is a mommy-blog, kind of, and yet it has been a loooong time since I posted anything about my kids. I think about them all the time, and what I could tell you about them, but I never do it. Here, I’ll tell you a little something about each of them right now.

Adora:

• is discovering a love of (and talent for) math because she has been learning (from her Dad who has been working with her on it everyday) that it is all about rules. She loves rules!
• secretly made Grace’s bed and cleaned her room for her while Grace was busy brushing her teeth because: “Gracie just doesn’t seem to understand how to get it done, but I think she deserves to have a nice room.” Seriously.
• is missing all her front teeth, and grins wide and talks excitedly, lisping away (often about her love of math).

Grace:

• talks incessantly. I sometimes catch her playing by herself and the chatting does not stop. I think she must have some sort of condition where whatever runs through her brain comes out the moth as well. It can be both cute and trying.
• reads like no other five year old I have ever encountered. She devours books, and road signs, and greeting cards, and food packaging, anything and everything with print on it. She can even decipher an adult’s messy handwriting (mine for instance – I always put her in charge of the grocery list when we go to the store).
• is the boss of her boyfriend and he doesn’t seem to mind at all. When they are together, the dimples and the laughter are flying through the air.

In other news:

• I got the foyer all painted during Spring Break. It looks great. It a wonderful shade of grey that looks like elephant skin in the day with the sunlight pouring in, and a dark almost mossy green when the light darkens in the evening. I discovered that it is probably a good thing that Matthew and I are not in the paint-colour naming business though because while I was rolling it onto the wall, I thought to myself ‘primordial soup,’ and then five minutes later Matt came down and said ‘it looks like a shade from military camo.’ I bought a few cute picture frames that I am in the process of finding just the right photographs for, and am on the hunt for a little table or bench to stick down there as well. Matthew will be adding some big fat white trim and then we’ll call it done!
• The suite is done and the renters are moving in in just over a week from today. My father in law was here just yesterday putting on the final touches and packing up the rest of his tools to take home. It looks amazing down there. The day Matthew put the advert up on kijiji and craigslist, we had someone show up at the door two hours after he listed it. We received something like eleven e-mail replies in the first day, showed it three times by dinner time and officially had it rented out the next day.
• Oh yeah, the running. Remember a while back and I said I go out for a run occasionally and I was thinking I should make it a regular deal? Well, I took my own advice and started going out regularly. I’ve been going out three mornings a week and I can’t believe how quickly my body got back into the rhythm of it. It’s amazing.
• Oh yeah, the writing. After bragging about the running I must hang my head in shame and admit that I have barely touched my book in the last couple of weeks. I have no excuse. I sure like to start new things. I really need to work on my stick-to-it-ivness. It isn’t all lost though. I have been actually writing a good deal more of it. I add to it a few times each week. The problem is that I’m not supposed to be writing more right now. Right now I’m supposed to be editing, organizing, and cutting out huge chunks of it that suck. So I feel like I’m not actually making any progress. Tsk tsk.
• Did you know that in the 1940′s Lysol brand disinfectant (so strong most of us don’t even use it to clean our toilets anymore) was sold as a vaginal douche, recommended to be used three times a week? I bet you didn’t know that, unless you’re in my book club. We are currently reading Flow: the Cultural story of Menstruation. It is a fascinating (and horrifying) book.
• My Mom and I went to see the Emily Carr exhibit at the Kamloops Art Gallery last night. We have both admired Carr’s work before, often together, but only in print, books, calendars etc. To see the original works? Moving. Haunting. Inspiring. You should go.
• Mother nature is toying with my emotions. Beautiful sunshine! Snow. Beautiful sunshine! Frost. Will the roller coaster never end? I just want to plant. It’s all I want.
• I’m looking forward to the weekend for once (usually, for me, the weekend represents an overwhelming amount of busy-ness what with work, work, work, coupled with all the usual social things people do on the weekends). My Mom is taking the kids, I’m taking Saturday off from work (or actually I’m going to go work my buns off tonight to get it all done ahead of time – my job is the type of work that if I don’t do it nobody else will. Also, if I don’t do it i don’t get paid) and going to Kelowna for the day. Yay! I have a gift certificate burning in my wallet for a store they have that we don’t. Also, I need to get out of here. Get me outta here! Shannon may be coming with me, Matthew may be coming with me, or I may be going by myself. It’s still all up in the air. But I will be going. Come hell or high water. I’m not sure what I will do other than spend my GC and wander around downtown (Kelowna has some of the bestest bookstores) but I plan to be there for the whole day, so if anyone who lives in one of the surrounding small towns (ahem, you know who you are) wants to come have coffee, let me know and we’ll hook up. But I know you generally have a lot on your plate on Saturdays. So no pressure. (And I can fit a few more bums in the Civic so if anybody else wants to join the fun, come along! It’ll be great!)
• Here’s another random tidbit that I will send you off to ponder: for centuries before the term PMS was invented, PMS was diagnosed as hysteria (hysteria comes from the same root work as uterus) and the clinical treatment for hysteria was for women to go to the doctor to be manually stimulated to orgasm by the doctor in order to chill the woman out. Only it was not considered orgasm, or sexual in nature at all, because women were not allowed to be considered sexual beings. Vibrators were invented as a clinical tool to save the poor doctors from this tiring task. Yep. Yep they were. Those poor doctors.