Busted on the Bloor Line: How Many Hours in a Day?

These days, our lives are moving so fast, I am honestly shocked when it’s Friday (when this photo was taken), and then the weekend whizzes by, Game of Thrones is over, and we’re back at daycare/work first-thing Monday morning. The weather might not feel spring-like for Ontario, but it sure felt spring-like had we been magically transported to Banff… it snowed last week, teeny tiny little white flakes that melted as soon as they hit the ground, but, still, snow.

That didn’t matter, we got out on Sunday and walked up the West Toronto Rail Path to the Clean Train Rally held by our MP, Andrew Cash. (Who else sings “Time and Place” every single time you hear his name? Exactly.) It’s nice to see the community rally over such an important issue, but it was nicer just to be out and about, regardless of how tired/ill I felt, and the lesson for this week is how consistently surprising your children are…

They were giving away apples and so I gave the RRBB a bite of mine, which he ate, and then another, and then another. And then he took THE WHOLE APPLE AND ATE IT CORE AND ALL. This is a kid who, up until now, has not eaten a sliver of fresh fruit, well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, it’s very rare that he eats fresh fruit, but he ate that apple, top down, for the majority of the walk home.

The second lesson for this week, no one cares about such stuff as much as you do. “RRBB ate an apple!” I kept saying. Blank stares. “An entire apple!” Patronizing, “that’s good, right?” Yes, yes, it is.

They were talking the other day on Metro Morning about that viral video floating around, Lotte Time Lapse, about the importance of capturing life like this — taking a photo of yourself every day, keeping a diary, finding ways to remember those things where memory itself becomes faulty. We have so many ways of pausing our life, social media, old-school blogging, camera phones, iPhones, iPad (which is what I took the above photo with) that it’s impossible not to be thinking about how to record your life as it’s happening. But it always gets me wondering about how different it’s going to be for my kid to grow up with all of this just the way life is — what kind of expectations around their lives, their images, their person, will change because I’ve been writing about him here since before he was born.

I’m sure I’m not remotely the first mother to be thinking about this kind of stuff. I mean, I keep his name away for a reason, and would have kept my own under wraps for longer if my particular work situation didn’t make it so that I had to drop my pseudonym. It’s a false veil, I know — people who know us, know him, know me — and my blog is small, traffic-wise, but I also want his life to be out there because it gives me pause to examine what it means to be a mother, how my life has evolved, and the different ways the world is now.

This weekend my son ate an apple. That news isn’t going to change the world. That he ate it core and all I find endlessly hilarious because why wouldn’t he, there’s an amazing sense of abandon in his world that we forget completely as we grow more and more knowledgeable. Seeing him chewing away, not caring about the juice dripping down his face, grinning, kicking his feet in his stroller, happy to be out looking at all the people around him, listening to the music, meeting his MP; it’s important that we remember these moments so that he has stories, so that he knows that he comes from somewhere, from two people who adore him, and if this is the way that I have to remember on his behalf, then I’m just going to continue, and worry about it all tomorrow, when, for sure, he probably won’t eat another apple in that very particular way again.