I’d like to prepare a menu of vegetarian meals. As a family, we enjoy meat but I figured a week at a time would be a good change, encourage healthier eating, and be good for the environment.

Here are my ideas of meals so far.

1. Pan-fried fish, mashed potatoes and green beans

(leaving in fish for now…)

2. Asparagus & Chickpeas over Rice

3. Guacamole Omelets & hashbrowns

4. Salmon Pasta

5. Fresh Tomato Soup & Grilled Cheese

and that’s where my ideas end, picking from among our favourite meals. Do you have any ideas to share? I’m looking for kid-friendly and non-mushroom.

Back to studying for finals!

p.s. I was surprised also at how few vegetarian recipes I use. Scary. I have a handful of bean recipes that we love but they all have to do with ham or pork or sausage or pork sausage. lol

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I never thought this day would come. I always wanted to be so terribly careful about I said. I wanted to have a message. Be a leader. Be someone, something, anything. But I have a family, a job, I’m in NURSING school and I’d like to write about it all on my blog. So the day has come.

This blog is officially a “whatever I feel like it today” blog.

Today there was panic and loneliness, feeling weird, forced extrovertedness, success, laughes and kale chips! Wanna hear about it?

Going back to school is a dream come true. As school drew nearer over the summer, my long awaited excitement slowly became a dawning anxiety and nameless general fear.

The first days were a blur, keeping my head above water, orientating myself to college as a mature student, to a system of education in a different country, to a university nursing program instead of the diploma one, to new people, to buses that don’t go the direction I think they will, to where to park and how to find food.

The second week was one long sugar craving. Seriously.

The third turned serious. Two quizzes and a first assignment due changed everything, and I went even more overboard than needed, totally killed a quiz my eleven year old daughter could have passed and am rethinking everything.

Hence, I’m blogging.

But today, wow, what a rollercoaster.

It occurred to me that we have our first skills lab on Monday – we get to bathe each other! – and that I’d better ask around to the few people I feel comfortable with to find a partner. My efforts gave me the impression that everyone else seemed to have paired up already and that I was a really late bloomer and would probably have a total stranger giving me a bed bath! This did not help that general nervousness and overwhelmedness.

I took my sad sorry self to the library to watch the skills video in preparation and found that my cat had eaten through my headphone wires. Strike two for the day. I kicked myself out of my hidey hole however and went over to the “caf” which in Canadian college speak means the cafeteria. And yes, it has it’s very own… you guessed it… Tim Hortons. When I saw some girls in my classes, I literally forcefully willed that I must ask them to sit and chat over lunch together. Natural for me would have been to sulk.

Miraculously it worked. We ate, we “studied” in the library, I found someone available to partner with before our next class, our teacher had us play a nursing board game for two hours which was JUST the break that everyone needed, we laughed and I came home to make mini crustless quiches and kale chips for supper. My ten year old son is eating the leftover kale by the handful as I type. I kid you not! Try them, you’ll love them. Just take it from me… don’t overdo the salt!

G’night, back to student mode.

p.s. and anyhow i really need somewhere to break grammatical rules and not captitalize personal pronouns just so i can pretend i’m heckling professors and their personal pet peeves. not to mention, i NEED somewhere to write creatively because they are making me be straightforward and concise and direct and… worst of all, without metaphor! /swoon

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Evening trips to the library are the best. Even when I’m being held temporarily captive to some novel or fantasy, I can still peel myself away from my obsession to take the kids to find a new book. Although, is it ever truly just one? No, not even close. Try a back-pack full.

As a young mom, as an emerging lover of better and better literature, I was anxious to help my children read well. But the volumes of Scooby-Doo mysteries, shelves of grahic novels and never-ending series such as Animorphs made me wonder however if I would ever win that war.

I persisted and compromised and tried to remember back to how excited I was to find another new Dean Koontz at my own library as a young teen. Now I get excited to find a Margaret Atwood. Go figure.

Along the way, they have read good books, good literature. But today I want to herald those other books. The ones with the thankless job of winning no awards, garnering zero reviews, sporting no bright shiny metal on the front. Are they simply taking up shelf space that should be reserved for the best books? Hardly. Because it is those books that my children wanted to read so bad that I received enthusiastic shouts when announcing it was library night.

I’d like to say thanks to Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie for making the library fun for my son. He would later read award-winning Canadian author Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens.

Thanks Ann Martin for the Baby-sitters Little Sister books that inspired my daughter to devour books and join her school book club and read even more.

My kids were not of a reading age when the Harry Potter phenomenon occurred, but I understand why parents supported their children’s interest and the surge of getting back into reading.

The lessons in reading, plain and simple no matter the material are enormous: they have learned to love and to laugh in books, to find books and topics of interest to them (so important to self-esteem), to say no thanks Mom to the ones that don’t (assertiveness), to respect my opinion too and trust that I’ll find them books they’ll love, to wrap little minds around the eternal paradox of the words fiction and non-fiction, to call the library a beloved place, to know where to go when in need of information and to run up the curving staircase to the children’s section with glee…

though last time they did that, the sweetest librarian you will ever meet greeted them at the top with “Slow down guys.” hehe

Library nights are indeed the best!

ps. In the latest episode of Bookrageous podcast, they discuss this very thing! They could have called it the “brain candy versus the GREAT books” episode. It is spun mostly thinking of summer reading and comparing that reading over the ages of one’s life, aka what you read over the summer in high school versus as an adult. You might be surprised which side they fight for.

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She surprised me so much. It was only a question, but the conclusion she drew from the answer floored me.

Backing out of the garage. We were going girl shopping. Becoming a woman has to start somewhere.

Aren’t you scared that you’ll hit the sides of the doorway as you back out? she poses.

My mind flitted over the oddity and reacted easily with a no, but because I’m a mother, added a word of caution.

Always be careful.

As daughters – or maybe, as children – do, she focused on the caution.

Really? she says. You seem so self-confident in everything you do, all the time.

Then and there, I mentally reminded myself that I teach her how to be a woman every – single – day.

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My secret fantasy came true today.

Every week I walk over to the pool with the kids, wait for them to change and come out onto the deck then watch their swim lessons between snatching paragraphs out of my book or forty winks in that cozy sauna environment. Surrounded by other parents, even grandparents, I’m not alone but nevertheless feel terribly lonely waiting there.

Without a conscious wish, I’ve imagined my husband – who is always at work in the big city that day of the week – coming through the doors to wait and watch with me.

The door opens to admit another parent. I turn to look. It’s never been him. Pretty silly to ever think it even might be since he works so very late. It’s my girlish princess being rescued-esque kind of dream that the feminist in me detests. But it was mine, he’s mine, and I never told him.

And yet today, I turned and it was him there, walking in to rescue me.

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