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Canadian Cold
I’ve never had any reason to dislike a Canadian before this weekend. Looking at the averages, they still come out ahead in the overall likability rankings, but Saturday night was still disappointing.
I’m telling my friends at work I’m coming down with a Canadian Cold. Knowing my travel habits (I have none), this invites a simple request: “explain yourself kind sir.”
As you may know, we spent the weekend at the modern melting pot known as Disney World. We were camping at Fort Wilderness – something like a Fisher-Price “My First Camping Trip.” We capped off the experience with a horse drawn wagon ride with thirty of our closest friends.
The wagon was packed like it was the last of only two rides for the day. (Funny thing, that.) Late arrivals were divided up based on available space, so Adam and Beth were sitting next to a young Canadian girl, whose mother was on the other side of the wagon.
This young Canadian girl, from the lands between Toronto and Ottawa, was picking on Adam!
I know! Our sweet, innocent Adam!
O.K., he wasn’t quite so innocent, but the young lass was clearly in the wrong. Way, WAY in the wrong. Canada Girl was running a fever and expelling germ ridden sputum like a rotating sprinkler head. It was so wrong. It was so disgusting.
It was SO not cool!
You may be asking me (futilely, from miles away in front of your computer screen) what about Canada Momma? I say to you, AMEN brothers and sisters! Who brings their kid on a packed wagon ride at Disney World when he or she is running a fever and sputum factory?
That’s SO not cool!
I understand crossing the continent for a moment with the mouse is pretty exciting, especially if it was planned months in advance. But it’s time to employ a little Vulcan logic here.
Say it together with me (imagine Spock dying in front of the captain, while good ‘ole James T is cursing Khan):
“The needs of the many out-weigh the needs of the few – or the one.”
Where are you Spock? You’re our only hope! Please don’t take it out on everyone else if I’ve misquoted you.
Given the nature of the typical Disney visitor, you could start a pandemic. Visitors come from around the world – and ultimately return to their homes across the globe. In fact, if I were a paranoid person,
Who are you kidding?
I thought I told you to stay in your box.
I might think this was a Canadian Terrorist plot to give the world a cold. Think about it, just passing the kid in a crowd would be like walking through those mist machines at Disney to keep people cool. Only in this case, it would be a cloud of germs, with the intent to keep people cold with feverish chills.
But what would Canada possibly stand to gain from the world catching a cold? How about WORLD DOMINATION of the O.T.C. cold medicine market? Do you have any idea how many cold medicines are made in Canada? Neither do I, so I let my Google do the looking. Have you ever heard of Buckley’s? Neither did I, but Wikipedia says it’s “…a cough syrup invented in 1919 in Sydney, Nova Scotia…. Noted for its strongly unpleasant taste….”
1919?!?
Strongly unpleasant taste?!?
Sounds like ‘ole Buckley could use all the help he can get, eh?
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Worth it
Parenting is hard.
For some, this is obvious. For others suffering denial, this is a sign of a severe character flaw. For a blessed few who’s beatification awaits them at their death, who’s names will be remembered in song and psalm for all time, this is an inconceivable truth.
God did us this one favor – he made these people rare. This is not to say parenting is without its rewards. If it was, Homo sapiens sapiens would have died out long ago (no mater how much fun getting there was/is).
This little post is for all of you out there who live in the real world.
Fortunately, there are times that force the hard parts to the rest of life’s background noise, and this weekend was filled with those times.
We took the kids on their first camping trip this weekend. On Friday I worked half a day, Cheryl picked up the kids early from school, and we drove to Orlando for a weekend of camping, Disney style.
Admittedly, Disney, realism, and roughing-it don’t really belong in the same post. But this weekend did involve tents, sleeping outside, camp-side cooking, and relaxed standards of personal hygiene.
Being Disney, it also involved buses, pools, water-slides, campfires with Disney characters and shops stocked with grossly overpriced marshmallows.
We brought our own marshmallows.
While the kids enjoyed the Disney aspects of camping, they also enjoyed its traditional appeal: running around dark campsites with friends exhibiting all the signs of a marshmallow sugar high, setting foods dense in simple sugars on fire, and eating lots of grilled meat.
It warmed my heart just seeing them having fun, soaking up all the new experiences and never growing saturated.
One simple moment almost moved me to tears.
Adam and I were settling down for the night and I knew he was afraid of the dark, preferring to sleep with one or twelve of his stuffed, furry friends for safety. I asked him if he was o.k.
“Well, I wish Halo was here,” (his stuffed dog), “but I’m o.k. because you’re here with me.”
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Breaking things
I had an embarrassing moment a while ago. I’ve had lots of embarrassing moments, but I’ve decided to limit this post to the one. We were taking Adam out for a practice run on his Christmas skates, and I laced up mine to show him how it was done.
But I didn’t get very far.
Instead of gliding down the driveway, leaning into an exhilarating tight turn onto the sidewalk, and powering down the hill towards Adam and Cheryl, I did none of the above. My skates stopped beneath me just moments after I got started.
Do you know anything about momentum, and if so is there a cure?
There’s usually a lot of small debris in our driveway, especially this time of year, so I wasn’t surprised – as much as I might have been. However, I was surprised when my skates refused to roll with my next few steps. That’s when I noticed the new debris on the driveway: little pieces of my wheels.
Thoughts:
- Damn, that’s peculiar.
- Damn, that sucks.
- Damn, I haven’t gained that much weight, have I?
- I guess polywhatsitcalled doesn’t last forever after all – not in it’s originally molded shape anyway.
Actually, the weight’s trending down these days. I felt it was important you know that.
Obviously, the catastrophic failure of my wheels ended our joint skate real quick. My enthusiasm for the day crumbled faster. I’m like a little kid that way. I was looking forward to one thing and nothing else measured up. Plus, there was my poor boy Adam to think about.
Was he going to grow up skating alone?
Was he going to blame me?
Would he carry this disappointment – this abandonment – through the rest of his life?
Would he have trust issues that would end relationships prematurely, leading to a lifetime of self-imposed isolation and loneliness?So you know what I HAD to do. I got a new pair of skates, which itself is an unusually long story.
Unusually long, you ask? Don’t you dare laugh.
Fast forward to this weekend. Adam and I have had a marvelous time skating around the neighborhood the last couple weeks, and all of my fears for Adam’s future have subsided. But I was getting a little too comfortable – a little too confident in my skillz. After an abbreviated yet marvelous skate on Monday, I was waiting outside while Adam went in the house to replace a newly shredded pair of warm-up pants for shorts. I was barely moving. I was on the sidewalk. I was right outside my house in peaceful Dunedin.
Now that I think about it, all the signs of disaster were right there. If only I could have seen them.
First a wheel got momentarily stuck in the gap between our cement driveway and the cement sidewalk. (Damn you cement and your cursed expansion joints!) One moment I was waiting patiently for my son… the next I was doing the “loosing my footing on skates dance.” It’s not a catchy name, but we’ve all been there, right?If you haven’t, you’re probably lying. But if not, then picture a guy with a tall furry hat dancing at an eastern European wedding. Time slowed down as I saw all my dignity flash before my eyes. Then time sped back up, I fell heels over head backwards, and threw my hands backwards to break my fall – hoping there was no irony in that last thought before gravity finished with me.
We know that God does have some sense of humor because children always catch us in these (hopefully) rare moments of excellence.
“Dad! Are you ok? That was GREAT!”
Adam, as your parent I feel obliged to tell you sixty-seven percent is not a passing grade in school when you get older.
I didn’t break anything but skin, but it really hurt. I did learn something though. You may never forget how to ride a bike, but you can forget how to fall off a pair of skates. That, or falling hurts more than it used to.
But fear not my friends! Adam came down to meet me (sprawled on the sidewalk), and we eventually finished our skate. With one exception, it was a great skate.
