It's a terrible photo I know, but you can see how widespread the storm is.  It's supposed to snow all day and into the night.  I wanted to go visit a friend in Saskatoon but that got put on hold.  I'm too old to brave snow covered highways anymore.  It never used to bother me, but I was young then, and ignorance is bliss.

Jack has recovered from his illness and is back to school.  He'll be visiting with his other family for a few days over Christmas.  It's nice to have a break for us, and I worry about him while he's there.  I guess that's pretty much life, isn't it?  

I was listening to Zadie Smith on the radio this morning, the author of "White Teeth", a book I've never read but have now put on hold at the library.  She said, that she was paraphrasing Freud and that she wanted her children to have ordinarily sad lives, to have some work that was meaningful, and to have love.  That caught my attention, so I looked up what Freud said, and he did not believe that a life could be lived without ordinary unhappiness.  I would have to say I agree with Freud about this.

Life is full of loss and sadness, intermingled with moments of joy.  I suppose it's how we deal with the losses and enjoy the moments of joy that decides how we live our lives.  

My youngest daughter was born full-term.  She weighed 10lbs 11oz.  Her apgars were fine.  We went home the day after she was born. When she was a week old, the doctor noticed a small cataract in her left eye.  Children shouldn't be born with cataracts, it meant something was wrong.  We were told she might end up blind.  What followed was more than a year of blood tests, CT scans, opthamologist appointments, and pediatrician appointments.  And in the end, all they could tell me was that my beautiful baby girl was retarded.

Katie's diagnosis almost killed me and it certainly killed the dream child I had imagined in my mind and in my heart.  It took me five long years to pull myself out of that deep well of grief that I found myself in and it fundamentally changed me.  It was not an ordinary sadness that I felt, it was a sadness that hurt my soul and turned the world into a dark place.

I discovered that life could hurt me beyond what I thought I could endure.  I turned away from my husband, from my children, and from my family.  I existed and that was all.  There was no joy left for me in the world.  I wanted the pain of that loss to stop and I kept moving in the hope that I could outrun it. The mother that my other children had, before Katie was born, died with the death of my dream child.  The wife my husband had, before Katie was born, also died with the death of my dream child.  There were no funerals but the world changed and I changed.

And now, now I hold back.  I'm not so brave to love as I once was.  I keep people away, at arm's length, even while I appear to be open and unafraid.  I'm not so different from my own father afterall.  I just fake it better.

And this is why I write, because I had no idea that I felt this way until I started writing.  My thoughts are usually jumbled together, knotted up, and writing it out allows me to untangle them and make something of them.  Some people can understand this, and some people can't, but it's how I am and I'm finally starting to understand this. 

It's that time of year when you can't believe how little daylight there is, 7.5 hours.  It's dark when I get up and it's dark before supper.  It also rained yesterday morning, so that was fun.  I slid through an intersection and will get a red light ticket.  Plus it's Christmas and Christmas just feels like a big lie.  Happy families, get togethers, and gifts.  Even Jack was mad at me this morning because he wanted soccer goalie gloves, right now.  There are a pair to go under the tree, but I can't tell him that and spoil the surprise.  So I snapped at him to stop asking me and then he got upset because he's sick and I shouldn't yell at someone who is sick.  He's not wrong but I also barely raised me voice.  I guess it doesn't matter, he felt yelled at.

Yesterday I made supper, a recipe I have used for years and it sucked.  I tried making caramel cornflakes and burned the caramel.  I got a red light ticket.  Katie sobbed when I took her home, which was the hardest to deal with.  I ended up crying too.  And Jack has been sick.  Yesterday he was vomiting with a fever, and today, just a fever.  

I don't like Christmas.  I have a small fractured family with a lot of issues.  Mum and dad probably felt the same way too.  They had grown daughters and then two young children.  Dad was in the military so they moved around a bit.  Mum was from England and all of her family were there.  We never spent Christmas with extended family.  I never knew my grandparents.  I spent a little time with one aunt and uncle on Vancouver Island and met mum's family as an adult.  My brother and I are among the youngest cousins, only one is younger than us.  There were never any family reunions or family celebrations, although we did all come together for Uncle Jimmy's funeral.  That was it, Uncle Jimmy's funeral when I was sixteen years old.  My ex-husband also came from a small family with a lot of issues, so not really any help there.  

I live in a small family at a time of year when large family celebrations are held up as the ideal.  I shouldn't complain, but I will:)

 

I have a new utensil holder.  I picked it up last night at the pottery shed.  I like it but not sure I like the glazing.  Live and learn.

I was listening to the radio yesterday, Quirks and Quarks on CBC radio, and there was a Dr. Zamorano on talking about his research of the brain actitivty of soccer fans.  He and his research team studied the brains of soccer fans using functional MRI to study the brains of 60 male soccer fans.  

“Soccer fandom provides a high-ecological-validity model of fanaticism with quantifiable life consequences for health and collective behavior,” said lead author Francisco Zamorano, PhD, a biologist working at Clínica Alemana de Santiago and associate professor at Facultad de Ciencias para el Cuidado de la Salud, Universidad San Sebastián, Santiago, Chile.  “While social affiliation has been widely studied, the neurobiological mechanisms of social identity in competitive settings are unclear, so we set out to investigate the brain mechanisms associated with emotional responses in soccer fans to their teams’ victories and losses.”

What they were studying was fanaticism in soccer, hoping to understand it better in a broader context.  They found that soccer fanatics had a higher activation in the reward systems regions when their teams scored which helped with group bonding and identity reinforcement.  When their identity was threatened, a loss, they had a momentary self regulatory failure.  They couldn't control themselves in other words.

“Studying fanaticism matters because it reveals generalizable neural mechanisms that can scale from stadium passion to polarization, violence and population-level public-health harm,” he said. “Most importantly, these very circuits are forged in early life: caregiving quality, stress exposure, and social learning sculpt the valuation–control balance that later makes individuals vulnerable to fanatic appeals. Therefore, protecting childhood is the most powerful prevention strategy. Societies that neglect early development do not avoid fanaticism; they inherit its harms.” 

And why does this matter?  Because that self regulation is learned early on in life from parents and caregivers who model the behavior, who can teach children how to name emotions and deal with those emotions.  At Jack's skill group it was called, name it to tame it.  We also learn to deal with these emotions by having warm, responsive adults who help us manage big feelings.  ( Full disclosure, I did not have this growing up).

So early childhood is critical in helping children learn to self regulate, and the consequences of not learning to self regulate, is an increase in fanaticism (because those people feel like they belong, they are with their people, none of whom can really really self regulate their emotions).  It can lead to things like January 6th, 2021 in Washington D.C., among other things.  It can also lead to much milder outcomes but I think all of us have had a moment when we are angry, or extremely happy, and feel connected to those around us who are all experiencing the same emotion.  There is a reason for that and it exists inside our brains neural pathways.  

It's amazing, isn't it?

Into the minds of soccer fanatics — how their brains are wired compared to regular fans | CBC.ca

What brain scans reveal about soccer fans’ passion and rage | ScienceDaily

Brain Activity of Soccer Fans | RSNA

Jack and I finally got our Christmas tree up yesterday.  I always love it when it's up, but hate putting it up.  It's not even hard to do, three pieces go together and the tree already has the lights on it.  Ta da!  I take my time going through the ornaments because so many of them brink back memories for me.  Now Jack has his own ornaments with the date on them and he likes that too.  I also have a few snow globes that play music, so that interested him for quite awhile.

A lot of my ornaments are glass and he helped me hang them.  Of course one got broken and I told him that I loved him more than I loved that ornament.  That stopped him from beating himself up.  Awhile ago, I heard this woman talking on the radio about how one Christmas she had accidently broken some of her grandmother's good dishes.  Her mother called out from the other room, "I love you more than those dishes." and it touched a cord in me.  Wouldn't we all want that?  And don't we all love people more than our things?  

It's funny how the universe continues to teach us lessons, not matter how old we get.  I hope to remain curious and learning until the day I die.

I first made these cookies a few years ago when I watched Alton Brown make them on his show.  I tried to make them, they turned out and now they're one of my favorites. Chocolate Peppermint Pinwheel cookies.  If I'm honest, I think mine turned out better than his.  The only problem with them is I want to eat all of them.  I think I'll make another batch. 

 I signed up for another pottery course this morning, and Jack wanted to take one too, so I got that done as well.  Saturdays he'll have pottery and Sundays he'll have swimming.  The evening swimming and soccer didn't work well for him as he got overtired.  He's still going to bed at 7pm so it was hard for him to unwind after his lessons for him to fall asleep easily.  He was up until 8 or 830pm and he didn't sleep well.  Maybe in another year or two he can take after supper lessons again.

I pick up my glazed and fired pieces tonight and I can hardly wait.  I was more adventurous with my glazing this time and I guess I'll see how it turned out.  Fingers crossed.

Katie's trusteeshipe still isn't finished and won't be completed for almost a year.  I heard from Canada Disability Benefit yesterday and the guy reassured me that we can reapply at that time.  Now we just have to get the provincial government on board with that decision, and I need it in writing.  I'm learning :)

Not much else going on here.  Baking, vacuuming (the semi-annual dog shed is ongoing), and staying warm.  It's too cold to even take the dogs for a walk, soon we'll all have cabin fever.

 

It's cold and going to get colder here so I'm staying inside and baking.  Jack was home sick yesterday but is back to school today so I was able to decorate the gingerbread men, without "help".  There are still more to decorate and he'll help with those:)

I went to my new bookclub on Saturday night and it was fantastic.  It's the ladies from my pottery class, we talked about the book, and then we talked about everything else, life, women's rights, children, husbands (past and present), grief, childbirth, and taking care of things (like vehicles, toilets, trailers, etc).  

There was drinking, not me, I was the designated driver for three of the ladies who can't drive at night, and then we made Christmas ornaments.  It was our first club meeting and the woman whose house is was at set up a craft for us to do.  Although we all take pottery together, which would be considered crafty, our skill set varies, a lot.  One of the ladies is a bona fide painter, I am not.  Her ornaments were gorgeous, the rest of us tried our best:)  And we all had fun.  It was fabulous.  It's good to have female friends, we need each other.  

Jack and I continue to meet up with my son for swimming on Saturday afternoons.  My son is on time, respectful, and even smiles.  It's a huge change for him.  He also takes his other son swimming on Sundays.  He's trying and I appreciate that.  The other day he even gave me a hug which surprised me.  He's going back to school to become a carpenter, he's working in construction now as a carpenter and can stay on at his job as an apprentice.  Trade workers are always needed.  

The biggest surprise this past week was the help my ex-husband provided in applying for us to be Katie's trustee.  He did pretty much all the work, including talking to the guy at the Office of the Public Guardian and Trustee.  It was way less work than I imagined, everything is sorted out, just the signing left and then I'll take it to the Public Guardians Office.  I thanked him for his help and it's good to know that he will help with Miss Katie.  The application will take a long time to go through the system but nothing I can do about that.  The government will just to wait.  They're the ones that caused the backlog in the first place.

Not much else going on.  And now for a funny.

Christmas baking has begun.  I screwed these shortbreak cookies up, but they taste fine.  They're lemon ginger shortbread, spicy and delicious.  For some reason I only put in 1/2 cup of butter instead of 1 cup.  They seemed way too dry, so I added more butter, problem solved, but they were still difficult to roll into a log so I compromised made them into a rectangle shape.  Still taste good.

Last night was Jack's Christmas concert which was lovely.  It wasn't too cold, hovering around 0C, so standing waiting for the doors to open wasn't a hardship.  The concert was short too, only an hour, which is much better for little kids.  He looked very nice in a button up shirt and khaki pants.  Usually he picks out his own clothes and looks like a homeless child.  His sweats all have the knees gone and have been patched a multiple times.  He also loves oversize hoodies and he's always dirty by the time he gets home from school.  It was nice to see him dressed up.  One of the kids looked like he was wearing a tux.  You do you.

We got home by 8:30 and he was asleep by 8:36.  He was miserable as sin when we got home, exhausted by a late night, but is fine this morning.  Yay.

I finally talked to a lovely lawyer yesterday and we will be applying for a guardianship review and trusteeship.  To hire a lawyer to do it, it would cost between $3000-$5000.  We're going to do it ourselves and my ex husband is helping this time which I appreciate.  It takes up to a year for the process to go to court and be approved.  Of course there is a backlog right now because of the Canada Disability Benefit applications and the provincial government being a dick, but at least the process has begun now.

It's quiet here right now.  It's snowing/raining.  Emergency rooms will be busy today with accidents and heart attacks.  I'm glad I'm retired.  I stopped by work two days ago to get signatures for a petition and got, and gave, lots of hugs.  It was nice to see my work family.

I could have worked on Jack's quilt this morning, but I wanted a break from it and I miss the clay.  I decided to make another mug and my skills have improved a lot over the last six months which makes me happy.  I've been practicing, and watching lots of videos about making mugs from clay slabs.  

I took the dogs out this morning for a walk.  Charlie and I usually walk around this pond which is now frozen over, no more ducks, geese, or coots.  I imagine there are a few muskrats, warm and safe in their homes.  There are coyote tracks on the snow, hoping to find a muskrat I'm guessing.
 

I called a lawyer's office again this morning, still nothing.  I called another law office that we've used for real estate, they also provide estate planning, and I can't get through to them either.  I also wrote the Federal Minister who is in charge of this whole debacle.  It's starting to feel a little personal but I have decided to stop worrying about everything.  There is only so much I can do and what will be, will be.  We'll see how long that lasts:)

I just got a phone call from Jack's school and he's been in another fight at school during recess.  There was a kerfuffle over a toque and Jack punched a kid, and the other kid punched Jack back (good!).  But now of course we have to deal with it once he gets home because violence is not allowed.  You can get mad, you can yell, but you need to walk away.  He knows this because we just spent ten weeks learning about all this stuff.  More practice required.  He is six and still learning to deal with some big emotions, with a brain that is wired to go turbo speed, or veg out speed, and with the two speeds alternating throughout the day.  Nana has that problem as well, all or nothing.

Jack is enjoying swimming with me and his dad on Saturdays, and I'm enjoying it too.  When I was growing up I was usually in the pool two or three times a week and I loved it.  It's nice to get back into the water.  There are things I can no longer do, like get out of the pool gracefully, but it feels good to stretch my muscles.  I refuse to look at myself in a mirror and figure others will just have to deal with my body as it is.  Last week there were some teenage boys spitting water at each other.  I did point out to them that the water they were putting in their mouths, had been in contact with everyone's butt, but I should have said that the water had been in contact with everyone's dicks.  That probably would have grossed them out more:)  Next time.