Going Native

Last night, the CRA hosted an event at the Odawa Friendship Centre in support of Aboriginal awareness. They promised cultural displays, Native-inspired food, storytelling, and singing and drumming. Singing and drumming? I bought three tickets. Sam's a huge fan of Aboriginal singing and drumming. A few weeks back, as we crossed into Confederation Park to see the ice sculptors in action, Sam caught the strains of Natives in song and had us beeline for the far end of the park first, so he could watch the performance from Daddy's shoulders. He loves all live music, but there's something about those drums ...

We toured the displays first, learning a little about sweetgrass, smudging, dream catchers, and the significance of feathers, animals, rocks and crystals to Native culture. Sam loved the colourful costumes, the beaded jewellry, the moccasins, and the instruments fashioned from horns and turtle shells. One table included a selection of full skins—among them a grey wolf, complete with sharp-toothed grin and ghostly blue marble eyes. While he seems comfortable enough in the photo up top, this one catches Sam first spotting the big, bad wolf (click to enlarge). Shock and awe. It took a few minutes to convince him to get close enough to touch it. "I know it's not alive," he remarked. "But it's still freaking me out."

He much preferred the whole bird wings to the limp but still ferocious looking wolf body. I love this little video of his interpretive bird dance.


The Aboriginal meal met with mixed reaction. He loved the venison sausage, the spinach salad with pomegranite seeds and pine nuts, and the bannock with strawberry preserves (2 hunks). But he ignored the wild rice casserole and spit his bison meatballs into his napkin. Then he sat front and centre for the storytelling to learn how the rabbit got its powderpuff tail and how bats came to exist. While he doubted those creation tales, he loved the notion of referring to the sun as an elder brother, to the moon as grandmother and to rocks as grandfathers. One of the storytellers gave him a polished stone last night, and this morning he ran upstairs to find it, calling "Where's grandfather?!"

The highlight of the evening, however, was when the drumming circle opened to include guests. Sam, who had been signing along from his spot on the sidelines, got right in there between two of the Native performers and did the dances. Later, as we headed for the car with our new dreamcatcher, crow feathers, and grandfather rock, Sam said "Carter and I are so going to play Natives." His Aboriginal awareness has increased to the point where now he counts Natives among pirates, cowboys, and superheroes. That may not be precisely what the CRA had in mind, but it's a good start.

Sticks and Stones

The other night I was fumbling sleepily through my bedside drawer and I pulled a rock from the corner where my stash of ear plugs belong. I dropped it on my night stand, put in my ear plugs and fell back to sleep. In the morning, I spotted the rock next to the alarm clock and smiled at the fact that its presence in my drawer didn’t surprise me in the least. This house is full of rocks. Sam makes gifts of rocks. Sticks, too. And leaves.

By last summer’s end, there was a bowl of “interesting” and “beautiful” rocks on the kitchen window sill, emptied from all of our pockets after an outing. His child care cubby was littered with bits of playground gravel that caught his eye and thus became art. How does one get rid of such tokens so lovingly collected and bestowed by one’s child? I spread the bowlful in the vegetable garden last fall, thinking that, if asked about them later, I could say the rocks would do some good out there. Aeration, or what have you.

There are mulchy fragments of a leaf in the folds of my wallet, too. When I spy it among the receipts I stuff in there, I’m hit by a fond memory of Sam swimming across the pool at the Fort Wilderness Outpost to give it to me. “Here, Mom,” he whispered in all seriousness, “This is a present for you.” I dried out that little leaf on my deck chair before stashing it away, wondering how it is that the dead vegetation floating in the pool strikes Sam as a keepsake rather than a sign that the skimmer isn’t keeping up. Another leaf, a giant one he picked up while visiting Grandma and Grandpa Ashe last fall, was carefully pressed for the return flight and pinned to his bulletin board in the kitchen.


As funny as it is sometimes to find them piling up, I adore these natural treasures. Last summer he unearthed a smooth hunk of sparkly pink and grey Muskoka rock from the beach at Camp Hideaway and another specimen came home from Bonnechere. They’re lovely. Those rocks and the powerful “ninja stick” he found in the woods along Moccasin Trail are bunched together next to a framed portrait of Sam in the living room. The juxtaposition is fitting. Sam and his sticks and stones. Oh, and that's a clay coil pot he and I made at Bonnechere. Seemed the right place for it.

These things are not entirely out of place around here either, when I come to think of it. A jar of small white seashells sits on the bathroom shelf, a product of my beachcombing during our Madeira vacation three years ago. The pair of larger shells, the ones Grandpa found for the boys, are nestled at the edge of the backyard flower garden. A few feet away, there are two large river rocks lifted from Laddie Lane during our last visit there, a souvenir of our fun times around the pool with Grandma and Grandpa Arnold.

It’s possible that Sam took note of such gatherings while he was a preschooler, and that he’s imbued all of the little bits of the natural world he finds at this feet with meaning. It’s sweet and so much a part of his little boy character that one day I’m sure I’ll miss the rocks in my nightstand drawer, the crumpled leaves in my wallet.

The Daddy-Sammy Holiday

While tidying the kitchen tonight, I noted once again the large sheet of paper held on to the freezer door by a Stanley Hotel fridge magnet. The page always makes me smile, but it's way out of date and needs to be relegated to the history books. This history book.

It's titled the Daddy-Sammy Holiday and it came about this way. A couple of days before I left for Colorado to be a bridesmaid in Lynnie's wedding (yay!), I reminded Sam that I was going to go on a holiday from January 1 to 4. As in the past, I had my "special occasion" arguments at the ready, but Sam cut me off before I'd barely begun to explain why he wasn't coming. "Can I make a plan for the Daddy-Sammy holiday?" he asked. Why certainly, small boy of mine who apparently no longer frets at his mother's vanishing acts. So we got out the massive tablet of craft paper and a pen and we made this list.

The Daddy-Sammy Holiday

Swimming lesson
See a movie
Wrassle
Play X-Box racing game
Order Chinese food
Watch hockey on TV
Walk Huddie
Tobogganing
Play Champion Battle Chess
Play Pirates
Take a nap
Go to Tim Horton's for a hot chocolate
Daddy haircut
Groceries
Connor's house
Have pizza
Get mommy at the airport (6:13 Air Canada from Toronto)

To finalize plans, Jeremy colour-coded the weekend: blue for Friday, red for Saturday and green for Sunday. They sorted out which things to do on what day. When I got home, everything had been crossed out, save for the dog-walking. Jeremy had penned in "too cold!" Seems Huddie preferred the indoor "wrassling."

While I think my holiday list tops the two (though we all would have killed for pizza at one point!), the Daddy-Sammy list makes me smile. Which is why it spent two months on the fridge under the Stanley Hotel magnet.

Hockey Day in Canada

Sam is a five-year-old boy living in the capital city of Hockey Nation—it's high time he strapped on the blades. Actually, it's been high time for about a year, but he tends to edge slowly towards such athletic endeavors, trying the idea rather than the equipment on for size. Then came Hockey Day in Canada, and Jeremy decided to get himself suited up for a return to the sport. Sam went along on the shopping trip, agreeing to a new helmet since he was thinking maybe he'd consider walking on the outdoor ice rink in his boots. Something magical happened at Play it Again Sports, however, and he came home with the helmet and elbow pads and shin pads and a new pair of cool hockey skates. And a big smile.

On a gorgeously sunny afternoon, Sam laced up his first pair of skates for the first time and crawled to his feet at the edge of a snow-dusted rink in McGregor Easson park. Carter, who's been taking lessons this season, confidently made his way across the ice, step-gliding its length and tossing back pointers. Sam was initially reluctant to field too many instructions from his cousin and his parents, pleading in his characteristic way "Can I do the lesson later? I just want to skate!" But he was far less frustrated than I expected him to be, picking himself up from falls, never complaining that it was too difficult simply to keep his balance nevermind put one foot in front of the other. I knew he had an Alfredson-inspired vision of himself making effortless loops of the rink, but he didn't seem to be disappointed by these baby step towards the NHL.

On the contrary, Sam was happy to hold on tight to Daddy as he gradually got a feel for the ice and a sense of how to move on it. Then he watched from a sideline snowbank while Jeremy "put on a hockey show," as Sam put it, marvelling at his fancy footwork, backwards skating and quick stops. That's when Trace and Anabel and I made our way back to the house. The boys spent another hour on the rink together, like good Canadians.

Check out the video!

Today is the first day of the rest of my blog...

About a month ago, I got a "Write, woman, write!" from Lynnie, who was annoyed by yet another long hiatus between posts. I'm been so busy being busy that I spend my precious free time upstairs with Sam rather than downstairs writing about him. He's already sadly resigned to my cyborg-like existence—so fully does he equate my presence at home with my fingers on a keyboard—I just can't tell him "Five more minutes, Bunny! I'm talking to Future Sam."

But when Lynn's comment came in and I saw just how long it had been since I marked something down for posterity, I immediately grabbed the camera and snuck up to Sam's room to see what he was up to. My plan was to snap it and blog it. But what he was up to was so much fun that I stayed and played instead. Let the record show, however, that I did capture the moment and gather the rosebuds and seize the day. I just didn't come straight back here and say so. That's what now is for, while Present Sam watches Bugs Bunny.

So. Last month, I found Sam flipping through one of his Jack Sparrow books, The Siren Call, looking for a picture of an island port or a pirate town so he could add some realistic detail to his Lego creation. If you ask me, the design he'd already come up with is cooler than anything we'd yet found in fiction, but Sam has a thing for realistic detail. So much so, that he's recently declared that, in addition to making and starring in movies and also being a drummer in an interplanetary band, he's going to be an historian when he grows up. More specifically, he'd like to make the "olden times" accessible to younger children.

His plan? Indestructible pop-up history books. He'll start with pirate times, but he'll also publish books about cowboys, knights, dinosaurs, and space travel. I think it's a good idea. I love a good pop-up. How cool is my director-actor-drummer-historian little boy?

Sam's Query

How come whenever I draw a picture of a cowboy's horse, it comes out looking like a cat?

Sweet Villain

This is why we call Sam "Two Face" when we're outside with him. His balaclava always twists across his face so that, even with his big smile, he looks a little scary...

My Funny Valentines

It's 5:30 p.m. on Valentine's Day and my boys are suited up in new aprons and whipping up a spaghetti feast to share. After giving me a sweet Valentine's card, Jeremy let me know we we'd be dining at an exclusive restaurant called Casa Marco. He introduced me to the famous chef himself and then whisper-prompted his opening line: "It will be my pleasure to welcome you this evening..." So cute. And the chef hat is a wonderful touch. I nearly cried (seriously).

I was permitted a brief tour of the chef's kitchen. As you can see, he's very serious about the culinary arts. His facial expression is perfectly matched to the role. His accent, however, is a little out of step with the Italian Restaurant theme, being a vague blend of British upper class and lisping retardation. Of course, it's utterly charming. Mixing his restaurant lingo up a little, Marco then asked. "Would you like the meal check, madame?" Dinner hasn't yet been served. But it does smell delicious from down here, where I await my reservation ...

I've wrapped two new DVDs in red ribbons for my boys to open after dinner. A pirate movie and a black & white classic. Should be a really nice evening. I love my family :)

Edited to add: Oh my goodness, what a dinner! The "restaurant" was candle-lit and the table adorned with a dozen long-stem red roses. The hand-written and illustrated menu featured Spaghetti Marco Extraordinaire, which the chef assured me would be ready in a "splitting second." He doubled back to explain that his "Chef in Training" apron was misleading: "I'm already a masterpiece," he declared. Yes, he is. Movie time with my boys... Happiness!