Things Jemma Says: Christmas Edition II

While watching Elf, during the part where Buddy is in jail:  "Why is he in time-out?"

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While singing Rudolph:  "And they shouted out with BLEE!"

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While arguing with Annie over the millionth thing on day two of school vacation:  "Annie, you're not the DEAL of me!  You're not the OWNER of me!"

Purplicious Party

We had Jemma's party this afternoon, and it was a party.  There were purple cupcakes, purple balloons, purple favor bags, and little birthday girls dressed in purple.

Jemma's party fell on Marta's actual birthday, so we lit a candle and sang to her, too.  Everyone had a great time, and now we're getting used to the idea of having a four-year-old in our midst, even though her actual birthday is still a few days away.

A Week of Life

A week ago last night, Jason got home from work a little before 8:00 and could hardly stand still, he was so excited.  I was on the couch, watching The Colbert Report, and he was prancing between the kitchen and the dining room with a huge grin on his face.

"What are you doing?" I finally asked.

"Come in the dining room," he said, and pointed gleefully to an extra envelope hanging from our advent calendar garland.  I took it down and slid out the papers that were inside, stood staring at the flight itinerary in front of me.  All I could see was "Detroit to Quebec City;" the rest of the page was a blur.

"When IS this?" I asked, dumbfounded.

"Tomorrow!" Jason said.  "And my parents are going to be here in five minutes!"

I died.

No, really.  It took me nearly an hour to do anything besides pace back and forth from room to room.  Tomorrow?  When would I make the 6-page Microsoft Word document to tell my in-laws how to live my life?  How long had Jason been planning this?  How was it possible that I never even detected a whiff of Something's going on here, I just don't know what it is?

Somehow, I started breathing again.  I packed.  I wrote frantic notes about homework folders and book orders and insurance cards.  And on Thursday around noon, we got on an airplane that would eventually (after some full-on sprinting the entire length of Concourses A and C in the Detroit airport to make a connection, of course) bring us to Quebec City.  Merry Christmas to me.

It was like being in a snowy village in France or Switzerland with the added bonus that everyone speaks fluent French and English.  "Bonjour," people (friendly without a single exception) greet you.  "Bonjour," you reply, and then you say, "How are you?" and they switch to English without batting an eye.

It's cold there.  Like, -12 C, which is, oh, around 10 degrees F - the kind of cold where, if you take your mitten off for a second to take a picture, your fingers hurt.  I didn't really let that stop me.

 

We stayed at the Fairmont Chateau Frontenac, which is as close to staying in a castle as I've ever come.  Gorgeous, full of history, and right in the heart of the old city walls:

 The view from our room

We walked everywhere.  We talked.  We went to the Dali exhibit at the Musee Des Beaux Artes.  We went ice-skating at night on an outdoor rink to the sound of Christmas carols sung in French (and, briefly, a group of carolers who stopped near the ice rink to sing George Michael's version of "Last Christmas," which pleased Jason very much).  We bought little spoons for soft-boiled eggs, espresso cups, gifts for the girls, and a tacky Christmas ornament of our hotel.  We wandered in and out of old churches.  We sat in the hot tub while snowflakes fell outside the windows.  We ate a lot of food and drank a lot of beer.

It really was magical, being in a charming, cozy, beautiful city decorated to the hilt for Christmas with snow falling softly and plenty of time to read, walk, talk, sleep, and sit in an old pub for three hours in the afternoon if we wanted to (we did).  

The magic ended, though, when we got stuck there for two extra days.  The snow started at 1:00 Sunday afternoon; our plane was due to fly out at 5:45.  The flight got cancelled, which disappointed but didn't surprise us, and after a round of calling-the-in-laws and calling-the-office, we decided we'd make the best of our bonus night in the city.  We checked back into the hotel, sat in the hot tub one last time (we thought:  ha!  ha ha . . ), and then went out to split a bottle of wine and a pizza at a restaurant we'd wanted to try but had been closed for a private party on Saturday night.  We set our alarms for 4:15 a.m. because the flight they'd re-booked us on was set to leave at 6:30 a.m. Monday morning.  Still time, we thought, for Jason to see his afternoon patients.  

That flight, though, got cancelled, too, and they put us on the 5:45 p.m. flight Monday - a full 24 hours after we were supposed to leave.  We checked out again Monday at noon, camped out in the lobby for the entire afternoon, eating take-out sandwiches and calling the airline repeatedly to check on the status of the incoming plane from Detroit (the one we'd need to turn around and bring us back again) before taking an expensive cab ride to the airport.  Delayed, delayed, and, finally, at about 6:00 p.m., cancelled.

We were devastated.  The weather, which had been a blizzard lasting about four hours, had completely subsided and hardly a single flake of snow had fallen all day; in fact, it was a little rainy and much warmer, and most of the ice and snow had melted.  I spent almost an hour on the phone with the airline, pleading with them to put us on another carrier, telling them we'd go anywhere with any number of connections just to get home before Tuesday morning.  Cincinnati?  Chicago?  Toronto?  We'd drive from there.  In fact, while I was on the phone alternately begging and Being Stern, Jason was talking with the concierge, asking them if we could rent a car this late at night and drive back.  

"No, no, no," they said, before Jason could even finish his sentences.  It would not be safe to drive through the night.  The roads were still very snowy.  It would cost a fortune to take a car into a different country and leave it there.  The road signs were in French.  It would take thirteen to fifteen hours.  I was almost in tears.

"I give you nice room," the man said, for less than what we'd paid on our first four nights.  We checked back in, took the key, rode two elevators up to the 18th floor and found a suite with a jacuzzi tub at the top of the hotel, set the alarm for 4:15 a.m. again, deciding to go to the airport no matter what and insist that someone - anyone - put us on a plane to somewhere on Tuesday.

When we straggled into the airport at 5:15 on Tuesday morning, there was already a line at the counter and our flight was already cancelled.  By the grace of God, though, we finally got them to book us on another carrier and left at 8:00 to fly to Chicago, then Lansing, where my dad was able to pick us up.  So at about 4:15 p.m. Tuesday afternoon, we were reunited with our girls, who we had been missing more than any other time in our lives.  It's funny; we've been gone from them longer than this before, but this time, knowing that they expected us back - and that we wanted and planned to be back - made it so much harder to be away from them.

Two days later, I still feel disoriented, like I lost a week of my life.  Suddenly, the Advent calendar is at "9" and I'm flailing to put my life back together:  get the Christmas cards out, shop for the family Christmas meal we're hosting on Sunday, make the favor bags for Jemma's party on Saturday, order one last Christmas gift on Amazon and pay to make sure it gets here on time, make granola for teacher gifts, bring back overdue library books, wrap the pile of presents that's sitting in bags on the cement basement floor.

Last night, exactly one week after Jason sprang this surprise on me, I went out to run errands right when he got home from work.  When I got home at 9:00, he was asleep on the couch, missing Modern Family,  a pile of unopened mail on the coffee table and a box of charts near his feet.  Life as we know it in all its hectic everydayness is back to normal.  We're looking forward to a festive weekend, more fires and playing in the snow with the girls, and some of the very best moments of the year still to come.  But tucked away in our memories forever, we'll have those irreplaceable moments we shared in December of 2010.  We'll hang our Frontenac Christmas ornament on our tree every year.  We'll say, "Remember when we got snowed into Quebec City that one year?"  It's become part of our story now.

Best! Husband! Ever!

Oh, hi.  I thought it'd be a normal weekend here, a quiet one sandwiched between last weekend's grown-up social events and next weekend's hosting-of-out-of-town-family/celebrating Jemma's birthday/celebrating Round One of Christmas.

But tonight at 8:00 I found out I'll be here instead, noon tomorrow through Sunday night.  What what?

Swoon.

Things Jemma Says: Lunchtime Wisdom Edition

Jemma:  "Here's our number one rule:  No Whining.  Here's our number two rule:  No Screaming."

Me, confused, as we had not been talking about rules, per se:  "Where is that the rule?  At dance?"

Jemma:  "You and Daddy say that."  Pause.  Whisper:  "But we can do those things outside."

Community

I didn't think I was going to write about today's Reverb 10 prompt, Community.  I sat down to write instead on a prompt I missed earlier this month. But then I started explaining how I wasn't that into writing about community, except I am awfully grateful for mine.  And I also wanted to quickly say . . . oh, wait.  I guess I am going to write about the prompt, after all.  Here it is:

Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

I am aware every day of the group of people I think of as my tribe, or maybe my village, both here within driving distance and scattered in a few other places around the country.  It's my family, yes - my family of four, my family of origin - but it's also my friends.  If "friends are the family we choose for ourselves," I am humbled to be surrounded by an amazingly diverse and gifted group of women.  At the same time, I know, if it stop to think about it, that I have (consciously or unconsciously) chosen to surround myself with them because of the way they make me happy, because I can be completely myself around them.

Building this community, these friendships, takes effort.  You can't stop returning e-mails, forget to make phone calls, decline invitations, quit listening, stop investing if you want your community to remain strong.  I've been living here for four years now, and this is the year I feel like I found my niche.  There were times, earlier, when I felt a little like I was rushing a sorority, trying to figure out who I could trust and how I fit into this circle or that group, wondering which relationships were going to be worth the investment.  This year, I got intentional about how I spent my time and noticed which people buoyed me and made me feel like my best self.  I made room for them in my life.  I noticed which people made me feel small, which conversations followed the same negative spirals, which groups looked shiny on the outside but were rife with backstabbing within.  I kept my distance from them.

I'm just home from book club, a group that never fails to talk about Big Stuff (tonight:  premature babies; how most places in the world outside of the USA and Western Europe, no matter how poor, scaffold their society to assist women and families with live-in help; racism; Alzheimer's disesase; family holidays) and laugh about Little Stuff (tonight:  wanting to videotape toddler diaper-changes to show grown children how much they used to drive us crazy; children's obsessions with vacuums; Bogs boots; Modern Family's admonition against having two fun parents; cheese).

I think this is key, to be able to talk about the Big Stuff and the Little Stuff with humor and integrity.  To be able to BE MYSELF and be supported and encouraged and understood.  I have discovered this kind of community through running, blogging, training for a triathlon, parenting, road-rallying, and standing outside my house in the late afternoons.  It's the reason I keep getting in the car to go to Friday morning yoga, Tuesday night book club, Sunday morning church.  It's the reason I head out the door for a run with a friend or drive to Indiana to bring a meal to a mom with a new baby.  The connections - the community - doesn't grow itself.  It needs to be nurtured.  It needs time, attention, effort.  And I have said this a million times before, I know, but I very much want my girls growing up seeing their mom build those relationships, nurturing that community.  I want them to know that building a tribe takes time and integrity and bringing a meal and remembering a birthday, and I want them to see how it's done.

Read Elsewhere: Boundaries

From Gwyneth Paltrow's weekly newsletter, GOOP:

“As a woman who was raised in a society where it is implied that women should be agreeable and amenable, where speaking up for yourself can label you 'difficult', I personally have found it difficult to do that very thing. Why is it important to have personal boundaries and make sure they are not crossed? More importantly, how can we keep them while coming off strong and not strident?”