Mama-luia

{I wrote this in May and apparently couldn't decide whether I should post it or not. But today is the day, since I can't sleep, I must resurrect an old hobby I love. Consider yourself warned that the updates are a little dated as of now.} I keep meaning to return to my blog, but every time I open it, I just want to cry, or at least cringe. My last cheery post was "A School Year in Review." Besides the obvious fact that I wrote that forever ago, how sad would THIS year's School Year in Review go? Let's see -- kids having a really rough time at school for various reasons, a bunch of time missed for specialist appointments, followed by a bunch of time missed for snow days, followed by a bunch of time missed for the Ontario teacher's strikes, followed by a global pandemic. via GIPHY So, let's just say this has been a rough school year. Oy. But rather than rehashing all that, I'm going to chat with you about our life in self-isolation: the g...

I hit the wall this week. Not with being with my kids all the time without any real breaks, or any clear sense of how long this will go on. Not from feeling like simply picking up bread and milk at the grocery store is a scene from a dystopian novel. Not even from the sheer repetitive, lonely, endless sense of isolation. No. I simply flipped in my brain where I can no longer stomach the Newspeak. Allow me to explain a bit of background first: I am someone who suffers from depression. My symptoms flare up painfully in the winter, when the poor weather tends to hole me up in my home for days and weeks on end. I have always said, and I continue to maintain, that my own house is a trigger for me. This is despite the fact that I am actually a homebody and an introvert. In general, I thrive on a lot of routine that surrounds my home life, but when the need to go out and do something hits, it becomes crucial to my mental health. Let me reiterate -- when the need to go out and d...

Patrick did something this week -- he backed up my (our?) photos from the various devices upon which they idled into the laptop's photo storing app. Suddenly, my vision of blogging has expanded and it seems POSSIBLE to write about those long-ago moments. Even if my memories are fuzzy now, I don't want to let this past year go without a recap. And as we are nearing the end of the school year, what better time than to reach way back, to the beginning of my pregnancy with Clara, and recall what this year has meant to us: Here goes nuthin'. August We took the kids on a last-minute road-trip to Montreal before school started. I had never been to Montreal, save one quick visit inside St. Joseph's Oratory on my way home from university about fifteen years ago. (A blessed memory indeed, because it involved my beloved grandmother as well as my parents). Patrick was kind of shocked to hear I had never explored this beautiful, old city and he was game to show it to me a...