Dispatches from a happy Hullian

This summer's season of tents is wound down — dagrim's cottage, Taylor Lake, Kaleidoscope. This year it feels like the parenting responsibilities are less total — I was able to read in various outdoor chairs and hammocks at every campsite, and my KG involved going to workshops and rituals daily, for the first time in years (probably since about 2009). It still takes a lot of energy to prepare and camp, but it was pretty satisfying!

After coming home, though, we managed to test positive for COVID, four of five in our household, one by one from Monday to yesterday. Elizabeth must be lucky and/or have lingering immunity from the spring, but the rest of us are getting through it. The little ones seem mostly better, Oscar and I are still in bad cold territory but are on the mend — we'll probably resume normal life this coming week. I'm feeling a bit touch starved and wanderlust-y so that will be good! Also, I got the bed and Elizabeth got the couch mattress this time, I look forward to sharing the bed again.

My switch-over to the new position was a bit bumpy with the usual IT permissions/compatibility issues, some staff turnover and the unexpected drag of a household COVID outbreak, but I still feel like it was a good move. We have a two-week window to piggy-back on another project in a way that tests one of our creations, and I feel like the new colleagues and clients are going to be easy to get along with and fun to work with.

I'm looking at the volume of stuff — work and union — on the horizon and hoping I'll be smart enough to delegate/trim as new stuff comes in and things get inevitably complicated. I keep trying to filter my projects and ambitions through my Bullet Journal and talking with people and I think I'm making progress... but it's a significant project. Maybe one for my next year of life (after I turn 42 on Tuesday) but probably not so time-bounded as that.

The older two are going back to school next week — school is open to Québec kids for optional classes, especially for kids who need a bit of extra support, and ours are both square pegs in their own ways and are missing school. With Elizabeth and me both being home-based workers at the moment, we can end the experiment pretty quickly if we need to, and we are all pretty robust and not in contact with anyone in an at-risk population, so it seems like an acceptable risk and we can be a dead-end for any contagion coming from the classroom. We got a message from Vivien's teacher and her class will have 10 kids, with rearranged desks and staggered recesses and lunches to avoid big congregations of kids. As a political decision, the Quebec approach might be flavoured by a belief in reopening the economy, but as a project with important health aspects, I think the school is doing pretty well and the kids are starting to get squirelly. We have to come up for air eventually, and this seems like a lower-risk way to do it. I think it's ethical especially if we share that we're doing this with people we might have contact with.

Ada, at four-almost-five, can pronounce “social distancing” pretty well. She was really keen to go to Kaleidoscope (August) with social distancing in place… we’ll see. One can hope (but I trust the organizers will be vigilant and careful)!

Us grown-ups have been thinking a bit of how we’ll proceed when restrictions lift, too — clearly deliberately and with some fulsome conversations, but the bridges will open eventually, and it sounds like some jurisdictions are encouraging people to pair households for mutual aid and companionship. With our relationships, a pair would still leave people out and probably result in some lopsided reconnecting, but with any luck it will be safe for us to rejoin some loved ones outside the house and the rules and good sense will let me see my Vanier loves, Heather and Andrea, soon enough. We'll have talked about it inside our polycule before the rules change, too, so we'll be ready!

It's a nice day today, we've got plans to hit the annual opening party for our neighborhood garden box project. Vivien has somehow managed to lose her bike helmet, which is a big hit to our family mobility. I've been wandering around looking for it to no avail.

I got that promotion… true to form this was the time I had figured it wasn't going to happen and that I should just plan for another couple of years in my old post. The new team (I'm leading a team of six) seems like a nice one and I've got a good 2IC who knows the work very well. I've got a lot of the subject-independent skills and I probably know more of the statistical nuts and bolts than I feel like I do now. I'm going to a new office on a floor with the open "2.0" plan; so far I think it'll work out okay.

I went on TV on TV and talked about polyamory and how I do it… you can only pack so much into 22 minutes or whatever, and I was on (in the second half) with a counsellor who had her views and a program to promote, but I think I did okay for my first time on live TV.

Next week is going to involve a lot of bargaining… once an election writ is dropped we have to wait until the next Parliament is good and settled before negotiating again… probably 2020. But we'll be working hard (and staying late) to get it done.

We're starting to plan the summer a bit — Elizabeth is making musical plans, we've signed the older kids up for a week of climbing camp, we'll probably festival with the pagans a couple of times… and in what I hope is the start of a series of adventures with individual kids, I'm going with Oscar to visit Heather, Andrea and Morgen in Banff for a week in July: his first passenger air experience and sight of what Albertans call real mountains :) I'm pretty excited and hour it will be wonderful bonding and relaxing time.

Ada is now over two months old! She has been camping, is starting to stick her hands in her mouth, babbles a bit and still sleeps pretty well.

( lots of entry )

I feel pretty content lately and settled into the new normal of three little ones and parental leave. I hope the next few months continue this!

Yesterday, we got the kids outside in and on things with wheels:

Vivien has sitting more or less down.

( two more )

Oscar continues to be kind of mama-centric, wanting Elizabeth specifically to do all sorts of things, from cutting banana bread to taking him to the bathroom. It's kind of a drag to be told "papa go away" a lot, but I hope it's just a phase as opposed to a parenting style thing — I do feel like I'm a little quicker to intervene when he's up to something iffy and a little more skeptical of his rapid-fire requests than Elizabeth is. Maybe my going back to daytime outside-the-house work will change the dynamics a bit. Oscar is also talking up a storm in more complete sentences when he feels like it — more people have names, and the flip-side of the specific requests is that he's using names as subjects more often in speech — things like "Mama carry Oscar" and "Vivien eat that" in addition to "Papa go away". He's also much more skilled at climbing playground equipment than in the fall, even though he had some time off (although we didn't wait for the snow to melt to set him upon the equipment this spring). He's skipping rungs successfully because he's in a hurry on things he couldn't quite hack in the fall.

Vivien is eating all kinds of things and working on a fourth tooth. She can also play while sitting and eat while sitting in the high chair (which has made the high chair cool again for Oscar). She's growing out of many of her hats and six-month clothes, and frequently babbling contentedly. Our days of being able to play a board game with a placid infant are going away again, though: all the bits are very fascinating. If we're lucky, she'll be a bit more amenable to a bedtime before ours sometime soon.

We've bought some seeds and are starting tomatoes inside. If we're lucky, we'll have zucchini, acorn squash, pumpkins, a few sorts of tomatoes, kale, mixed carrots, strawberries, pears, peas and chives. We'll probably manage a subset of that, but we can hope (and trust Gord and his CSA to give us lots of veggies, too). The crocuses are up again in the lawn, and I scattered some globe thistle seeds out front for colour and spikiness. I hope it's a good year for green-thumbiness!

Last night, with the kids in the care of my parents-in-law, Elizabeth and I went to Atelier Denu at UQO. She brought her drawing supplies and I brought a bathrobe and sandals (for the break, so I wouldn't get cold).

There were about half a dozen people drawing, which is a small crowd for Denu, probably due to the brutally cold weather. The platform had chairs on all sides, but people clustered up at and near the tables, putting them in something like a 120° arc. Shawn had given me a quick training on Monday and I'd tried a couple of timed poses to see what my legs were willing to do for me ahead of time, but I was planning on mostly making things up as I went along. In addition to the platform with its mat, pillows and sheet, there were easels, a ball, a broomstick and a little promotional beer pail at my disposal.

The poses started at two minutes, and worked their way up to seventeen. I did my best to vary facing and level, and mix props and propless poses. I think I got in a good variety, and managed to hold still even in ones that turned out to be physically difficult. It wasn't always obvious which ones would be: I did a supine pose with one arm off the platform that turned out to be quite tiring, and a long prone one, almost going-to-sleep, that had so many points of contact with myself that I felt like a big mess of pins and needles by the end. Climbing the easel, a big open pose with the broomstick, and some modified yoga poses were all easier than I'd thought they would be.

Mentally, it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. Once I was up there, I was thinking about position, stability, breath and keeping my focus on that bit of debris or architectural feature to keep my gaze and position stable, mixed in with wandering thoughts about life outside the studio. It was very much my yoga-space, as far as my thoughts were concerned, which shows both that I'm something of a technically-oriented yoga person (to the detriment of all the noble stuff my mind could be doing while in a pose), and that maybe the time and money I've spent on yoga classes can have tangible benefits — two modelling sessions would pay for one semester of weekly yoga at work! I think I felt most naked right after taking off my clothes, after that everything else was more pressing. It didn't hurt that the room was at a comfortable temperature, the doors were closed and the air was still.

It was also a notable night in that for the first time, we left both kids in the care of others. When we got back, Oscar was basically asleep: a little wibbly and fussy still, but in his room in the dark and easy to cover, calm and leave to doze off. Vivien was a bit distraught but happy to get Mama back, and Elizabeth's parents didn't seem particularly frazzled by two and a half hours of both kids. I think we all knew this was about what would happen, but it was still good to get the proof that Elizabeth and I can escape for a bit together. It took until eight months with Oscar for us to get a date in, so evidently we're something like 50% more confident by some measure this time around. A two and a half hour date isn't long, but not bad for parents with a baby who's still not into complementary foods.

I think I could definitely be a nude drawing model again. I didn't have any epiphanies or crises up there: it was a pretty relaxing and satisfying gig (although my muscles were a bit sore afterward). I'd recommend giving it a try to anyone considering it, and Denu feels like it might be a better-than-average place to give it a try.