In the last few weeks I have slowly been coming out of the sleep deprived stupor. With my new clarity I remembered to check out the Canada Reads webpage to see what are this year’s contestants. I got my hands on two of the books and breezed through the first one.

Something Fierce by Carmen Aguirre is a coming of age memoir recounting the life in the Chilean resistance movement. This book is at times harrowing and it came very close to giving me nightmares. However, it is very compelling and very well written.

I have not read any other entries, but if this book wins the Canada Reads contest it will be a well deserved win. However, the book is not really about Canada apart from bringing home the fact that Canadians have a good story to tell about where they came from. Also, it is a very emotionally difficult to read which makes it not a book I would recommend to just about anyone. These two factors might make it difficult to win the Canada Reads prize.

2011 started off with me completing my graduate degree. After this I needed a bit of a break but I got pregnant instead. This caused the most severe case of mommy brains ever and I am still suffering from it.

January

Despite the mommy brains, I learned to spin and practiced a few new (to me) knitting techniques. This year I made eight hats, three pairs of mitts, two pairs of socks and one scarf.

February

I have also taken to examine my lifestyle habits in terms of where I go on regular basis and how I get there. This was particularly relevant to how much I bike. After some exhaustive wheel gazing I determined that despite only saving me one not quite full tank of gas per year, biking is really fun.

March

This year for whatever reason we missed our usual vacations, i.e. Cres and Vermont/New Hampshire. I am looking forward to re-establishing these in the coming years. We made up by going to Zagreb and London in April.

April

While Chris and I were narrowly avoiding the Royal Wedding in London, the boys were pampered in Zagreb and nearby spa towns.

May

We made the best of June while sailing in the pool. I’ve taken to taking the kids to the library at least once a week. If I have read a lot this year, I have not read much literature. I barely read a few of the Canada Reads books and I read Hornby’s Slam which I picked up used on the South Bank. I finally got around to reading a collection of short stories “Pokazi koliko me cijenis” which my sister gave me a few years ago. All of these were enjoyable.

June

An interesting and successful experiment was completed this year as we have signed up for CSA (community supported agriculture). This made for very happy and healthy eating throughout the growing season.

July

By fall, firstborn has graduated from preschool. He later started kindergarten and is so far enjoying it.

August

September brought lots of excitement with the birth of Markus.

September

After Markus was born, grandparents stayed with us for a while to spoil the older two while I am taking are of the baby.

October

This year I have been very exhausted, mommy brained and mostly focused on getting the most essential tasks done and caring for my family. Despite this mostly myopic lifestyle I was glad to have spent time with friends and family. At work, home, in the neighbourhood and overseas, while knitting or watching movies with kids or without, I don’t know how coherent I was but I was glad to have wonderful and interesting people to talk to this year.

November

We have big plans for next year and I hope it will be another good one.

Happy New Year!

December

There are plans for a new condo building at the abandoned post office site in my neighbourhood. My neighbours are up in arms about it as the sixteen floor structure threatens to change the look and feel of largely low rise suburb.

I feel ambivalent about the whole thing. On the one hand I definitely do not want skyscrapers popping up on every underused plot of land and I would hate to have a condo building behind my house where the church and the school are now.

On the other hand, from environmental perspective, I cannot object to planned intensification. This might sound hypocritical from a person in a four bedroom corner lot home, but I prefer people to live in pretty condo buildings than sprawl out on farmland the way Ottawa has been growing. Is sixteen stories too tall and if so what is the acceptable height? Apparently the developer paid around $900,000 for the lot and I expect they want to turn a profit. Would ten stories be enough to both satisfy the neighbours and provide profit for the developer? or five? or two? The existing condo building next to the post office lot is eleven floors high.

My main concern is the road that the condo is to be built on. The street has some really nice elements. A few beautiful parks, stretches of pretty to tolerable town homes, our beautiful daycare bungalow, a cutesy co-op apartment complex and even a fire station that never fails to cheer up my boys. On the other hand, there is some ugliness too. There is the telephone central office with an ugly parking lot filled with even uglier service trucks. There is a huge parking lot serving a pink siding church whose architecture looks like it has been made by a bunch of kindergarteners on too much sugar. There are a strip mall and an indoor mall that are visually pleasing enough but are filled with empty spots and businesses and groups not really suited to malls. If it wasn’t for the barber shop I would never set foot into the indoor mall and I certainly never visit the strip mall and yet these shopping locations are intended to serve my neighbourhood.

For me it comes down to not having a problem of condo buildings being built on ugly locations but I would be really upset if they were built on pretty ones. My hope is that with increased population in the neighbourhood, the services (such as bus routes) and businesses will return here and I will no longer have to drive to Westboro to get decent coffee served in real cup with a saucer. I’d love my neighbourhood to not only be walkable but be walkable with purpose – i.e. contain more than half a dozen businesses and services that are worth walking to. Will new condo buildings be a catalyst for this to happen, I don’t know but I certainly hope so.

One of many reasons my house is full of junk is that I have hard time throwing out stuff that could be useful some time later. I do get rid of old clothes on regular basis, but there are always many pieces that are too worn to give away. I must have at least five or six big boxes of former clothes around waiting to be “used”. In the past, I have made rags from these but as I have employed a cleaning lady for almost ten years now, my use of rags is nowhere near high enough to eat up the piles of t-shirts and other fabric junk accumulating in the house.

When I do manage to upcycle a piece of clothing, I am really happy. This is the story of my old winter coat. I got it at the Bay for $25 a year before Trevor was born and wore it until last winter. I really should not have been wearing it last two years as it was already ripped and worn, but my frugality and lack of time to go and buy a new coat won. Last spring I finally washed and stored it in one of many “potential project” boxes littering around.

As the weather got colder I noticed all these moms with nice stroller bags and I convinced myself to get one. I am planning on taking long walks this winter and an extra layer to protect my little cheese factory form the cold would be just the thing. Well, I took the old coat, sewed sleeves and the bottom part and voila – a baby bag!

And the obligatory action shot…

I am pleased as Punch.

It is Monday morning. Owen, Markus and I have not had any pre made plans so I though we might go to the Children’s museum. It is 10 AM and we still have not gone. Markus is asleep and Owen and I have been snuggling on the couch. We’ll go later, or not at all.

One thing that I have learned on these mat leaves is to take it easy. Do many different things but do not rush or drive too much. Try and keep the house tidy, but don’t overdo it. And always freeze leftovers.

Today, in the end, we stayed home, Markus had an unscheduled bath and Owen run around with his Angry Birds props.

Very good.