Next weekend I take my motorcycle course and then I’ll be able to ride it! So excited.
For now, I purchased myself this bike and got it all fixed up today and rode it home. One of my friends says it’s the gayest bike ever. Her name is Paulie, after the crazy lesbian in Lost & Delirious.
If you can’t tell already, yes, I’m wearing leg warmers.
Today I turn 30. I haven’t cried about getting older in at least a few years, but admittedly, today’s a tough one for me. I don’t think 30 is bad, I just don’t see myself as 30; 30 isn’t how I thought it would be; 30 seems so OLD (even though all of my closest friends are about five years older than me and I don’t think of them as old at ALL); 30 seems so serious; 30 is 30s. I am in my 30s.
My twenties kicked some major ass.
When I was 20 I picked up and left on my first trip around Europe. I travelled around five countries (England, France, Luxembourg, Italy and Greece) for about seven weeks. It was the first major thing I’d ever done alone and it was thrilling and life altering and it started my lust for travel. A few weeks later I went back to Europe to live for a few months as an au pair in Luxembourg for a wealthy and sex-crazed family. I travelled around a bit more, and added Germany, Belgium and Holland to my list. Amsterdam had the craziest weed I’ve ever smoked.
In 2002 I went to college and graduated with a 98.7% average and came out with a Web Design diploma, which took me to West Africa in 2003 to teach under-educated women basic computer skills and to develop a website for The Gambia’s largest hospital in order to help with funding. The five months I spent there was the most perception-changing experience of my life, even more so than having a child.
In 2004, after my time in The Gambia, my then-boyfriend/fiance and I travelled around Europe and I saw Portugal and Spain for the first time and lived in the south of France for a month before heading back to Canada. Later that year, I fulfilled another one of my goals, to move to British Columbia. We settled in a small town named Penticton, where orchards and vineyard were abound, and we bought vintage Vespa mopeds and bought fruit fresh from the farmers. Our relationship quickly disintegrated and when he became physically abusive I applied to a job for BME (never picturing that I’d be hired), and lo and behold, was invited for a six-month internship in Mexico in 2005.
I met Clive on March 15, 2005, spent a really wonderful four months in Mexico working for a company that I really loved [note the past tense], and then we moved back to Ontario together for a short period before we moved to the British Virgin Islands together in September of 2005.
I got a job as a Web Developer and Fund Analyst there, and we spent our weekends at the beach or in the ocean, snorkeling. I hated living there (the price of living, racism and my boss all felt overwhelming), so we moved back to Canada in the early summer of 2006.
A few months later, my most life-altering event happened: I got pregnant and on September 9, 2007, Ash was born.
Since that day, my life has been most about HIS life than my life, and I’ve noted his birthdays and his milestones far more than mine. My days spent with him are the important ones, everything else pales in comparison.
Maybe that’s one of the biggest reasons that my 30th birthday has affected me in such a surprisingly negative way- I still feel like I’m 27 years old. I’m not sure where the past three years have gone, it’s as if I’m stuck in time, with this child who keeps growing and learning and changing, yet, I still feel the same as I did when he was first born. I don’t know how I got to be 30.
Nothing matters as much as Ash does, so to suddenly be faced with a milestone (big or small, depending on how you look at it) forces me to look at my SELF- at least for a day, and touch base with who I am and how happy I am.
My life is filled with so many wonderful things. I truly feel that I took full advantage of my youth, that I accomplished almost everything I could have, that I didn’t pass up many opportunities. I flew on as many planes as I could, I visited as many countries as possible (17, I think), I laughed with as many people as I could, I learned the meaning of pure and true LOVE with the birth of my son.
…. So, will I travel that much in my 30s? No. Will I have another baby to love in my 30s? Only time will tell (there are no imminent plans). Will my life be as exciting? Probably not in the same ways. Am I still looking forward to my 30s? Yes. But am I incredibly sad that everything that my 20s were to me is over.
At least I did it, and I’m not sitting here saying “I wish I would have.”
Spring is here! I woke up to birds chirping! Tomorrow is supposed to be 19 degrees!
Here’s what spring looks at my house!
And here’s what a kid with the flu looks like.
I left our bedroom 12 minutes ago and haven’t heard a peep out of Ash since I left. He’s got Maroon and Cheswick (teddy bears, and one does not go in there without the other), two stuffed cats, a stuffed snowman and a dinosaur puppet in bed with him. Sleeping with animals (and occasionally a dinky) is something new, something introduced by me in the past couple of months to try to ease the transition from falling asleep with a boob in his mouth to falling asleep on his own.
Mission: COMPLETE.
Most nights, unless I’m totally exhausted and fall asleep with him, we nurse for 15 minutes, cuddle for another five minutes, I’ll give him a one-minute warning, he’ll ask for another minute of cuddles, and then I’ll go, promising to be back soon and we’ll cuddle all night long. “Cuddle all night long!” he’ll repeat back, and then I’ll get up, close the door, and that’s it.
Spending 20 minutes every night is probably cumbersome for many parents out there, but it’s always my favorite part of the day. It’s time for me to lay in silence with my son, nourish him, sometimes we get silly, sometimes we whisper secrets, sometimes I rub his back, sometimes I just hold him, but I always love it (as long as it doesn’t last 45 minutes, because when bedtime takes that long, I cannot enjoy it, no matter how hard I try, and I get quite pissed and then send Clive in to finish up).
Since cutting out night nursing my milk supply has dropped and my boobs have shrunk down to a C again (they were very likely more than a DDD two years ago), and Ash can spend a lot of time suckling and there’s not a lot of swallowing happening. The other night I counted how many tongue thrusts between swallows, and they were few and far between- 27 tongue thrusts at one point, less than a second between each one. He’s not getting a lot of milk at all, and at this point I’m feeling…
done.
I never wanted to wean Ash (I wanted it to be a mutual decision), but I’m feeling ok(ish) with the idea that it can probably happen soon(ish). He’s showing no desire to stop nursing, so I’m afraid that this will pretty much be a one-sided decision, and that fact alone makes me sad, as I’ve always followed his lead with everything, actively WEANING makes me feel like I’m doing something unnatural. But at the same time, he’s 2.5 years old and I’ve passed my goal of two years nursing and looking at that alone, I should feel okay about it… but I don’t.
I’m so proud of nursing a toddler (though, I was proud throughout the whole thing), proud that I made it through, proud that I do what’s right for HIM, what benefits OUR health and our relationship, proud that I’ve been able to get past the first six weeks, past mastitis, past the insane amounts of plugged ducts, past the engorgement after going back to work, past the wakeup calls every 1.5 hours for his entire life, past EVERYTHING and most importantly, done what his little unselfish body wants and needs.
Someone said to me that when I’m done nursing I’ll probably have a kind of identity crisis because it is so much of who I am (I’ve never known motherhood without it, after all), it’s what I identify with, it’s what I believe in, what I’m passionate about. The thought does scare me a little (to the non-nursing people out there, I don’t expect you to get it, and maybe to the some of the nursing people reading, you may not get it either).
So, back to what I was saying at the start of this entry, Ash just went to bed. This was my first night putting him to sleep without giving him milk. I told him that we should just cuddle. He grabbed onto them as he usually does and asked if they were “dirty” (???) and so I said that they were (uh, they’re not) and he asked why, so I said that it was because I didn’t have a shower today. He was okay with that. No tears. No whining. I told him that mama milk is for little boys, but he’s a big boy. He said it was for big boys too, but still was okay with me saying no. I have been telling him that milk is for babies and little boys a lot lately, and I feel so gross by telling him that, lying to him, manipulating him into thinking he’s not welcome to it.
So, I feel quite done with nursing, but there is another side to this, which I will write about in order to be completely honest with myself.
Since night weaning I’ve been gaining weight. Nursing burns off a lot of calories, especially when nursing every couple of hours), and nothing else about my lifestyle has changed, but I’m heavier than I used to be a couple of months ago, heavier so that my favorite pants do not fit like they used to, heavier so that my face looks chubby, heavier so that the scale is more than it has been since I was pretty newly post partum (I lost all my weight within about three weeks except for about 5-10lbs), and ugh, it makes me feel so awful about myself that I’m willing to do just about anything to take it off (haha, as any of us fatties like to say, “except eat right and exercise”), including wean. Many of my friends shed like 10-20lbs quickly after weaning because their hormones changed away from being a nursing woman to being just a woman, and I crave a quick fix like that for these sneaky extra pounds that have been creeping on, slowly but surely.
What a horrible, horrible, selfish reason to want to wean. And the worst part is, is that I actually think that my body won’t shed those pounds just from weaning ANYWAY. But I hope, and I dream, and I think, “if I could just wean, I would be thinner.”
I’ve struggled with weight ever since I can remember, mostly the head-fuckery of it all, thinking I’m fat when I’m really not (14 years old and 112lbs I remember how fat I thought my thighs were), getting fat and being in denial, and every single time my weight went down it was not because of any exercise, or really any diet change. It was just my body adjusting somehow and the weight coming off by itself. Every time I have tried exercising and dieting, nothing has changed. I did 21 days of “The 30 Day Shred” and lost nothing, so stopped doing it. Clive and I would do weight lifting classes twice a week and a yoga/pilates/tai chi class every week and my body didn’t change at all. The only time I lost weight on purpose was when I was smoking a LOT, drinking a LOT of caffeine and was able to beat my sugar addiction for the first time in my life. Then people told me I looked unhealthy (which I didn’t), because they weren’t used to seeing me at a fairly normal weight.
Anyway, I’m looking for a quick fix, and for some reason I think that weaning will be it, and I know in a few months when Ash is off the boob and I’m still as heavy (if not heavier), I’ll be kicking myself and hating my motivations even more. Fuck body issues. FUCK THEM.
Clive and I are coming up on FIVE YEARS of being together. In three days it will be the anniversary of us meeting in Mexico. I can still picture meeting Jon and Clive when they came to pick me up at the airport. I’d packed my bags, including a couple of presents for Ari, enough clothing to last me six months, a desktop computer and monitor (ah, awkward and heavy days before I owned a laptop!), and visions of BME swirling through my head. We hoped into the orange dune buggy and my life was changed forever. We all got really drunk that night.
On March 16 I realized I’d met the man I would someday marry.
On March 17, Jordan, Clive and I went out for drinks at an Irish pub in downtown La Paz to celebrate St Patrick’s Day and when we got home Clive and I kissed for the first time, and the rest is history.
Last night the power suddenly went out at around 11, so Clive and I went to bed early, but not before playing around in the dark, we often have fake fights where I’ll hit him or he’ll hit me, and last night in the pitch dark we were both hitting and kicking the air trying to get one another and not get hurt.
When we climbed into bed I remembered that he probably didn’t turn off the light in the basement and asked him to go and turn it off, with the ulterior motive of scaring him when he came back to bed. So, when he left, I quietly snuck to the other side of the bed without him hearing or seeing me. I saw his shadow climb quietly into bed again, heard him feel around for me and whispered, “Bubba?” (which is what we call each other, ahemmm). “Bubba? Where are you? Bub?” And I was literally biting my lip on the floor, trying not to burst out laughing when I couldn’t control myself anymore and just howled with laughter out of his desperation of trying to figure out where the hell I went. So much for scaring him.
It was totally one of those “you had to be there” moments along with “you had to be us” moments in order to find it at all amusing, but the fact of the matter is that Clive and I still laugh and joke around and are in love and even though times have been really, really hard between us, we’ve stuck it out and are happy.
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I was speaking to a good friend last night (Clive’s sister) about how much has changed in the past five years. Five years and a month ago I was with a man who was physically abusive. I lived in British Columbia and worked at a call center and owned a vintage Vespa moped. I made about the same amount of money and weighed the same as I do now. Four years ago Clive and I were living in the Caribbean and I was hating every moment of it, except for the times we had masks and snorkels on. Three years ago, pregnant and in London. Two and one year ago, in Halifax, a proud mama to the smartest little guy. I wish I could say that I was surprised at how my life’s turned out, but this is exactly how I pictured it.
09 Mar, 2010
Posted by: typealice In: Baby|Monthly Newsletters
Dear Ash,
You’ve changed so much in the past two months, it’s hard to remember how you once were! You’re entirely a little boy now, full sentences, complete grasp on language, and your information-sponge brain is CRAZY COOL.
“Don’t say no, that’s not very nice!!” is what I hear about 10x a day, including if I’m just answering a question your father has asked me like, “did you read this book?” You say that sentence with such gusto and determination- especially when I’m telling you no when you’re doing something you’re not supposed to be, that we’ve had to start saying other things rather than no, such as “RED LIGHT!” (thanks, day care!) or moving your attention to something you are allowed to do. No one wants to hear the word no so often, so I don’t blame you.
Sometimes at night when I come to bed and you stir awake, or if you’re having a hard time falling asleep and I’m feeling especially patient, you and I will whisper. I’ll tell you a story from when I was a little girl, or we’ll talk about things that you like, like your toys. You’re completely captive, silent, still, and we focus on each other and I feel the bond between us growing stronger and stronger. I love this quiet time.
My mom told me that when her kids were about your age, her grandfather said to her that she didn’t know it yet, but this is the best time of her parenthood. I thought about that, and knew that my great-grandfather was right; you’re safe, I know where you are at all times, you’re too young to know how big and scary the world is, the things that make you the happiest are raisins and dinky cars. Your life is simple, beautiful, and because of that, so is mine.
You understand plays on language now, like if your father says “Value Village, not Val-ME Village!” You get a kick out of it! Same with “me too, me three” etc.
Your hobbies are still the same as they have been since you were six months old. Cars. Trucks. Trains. We went bowling with your uncle Jarrod in your 29th month, and with some help and not sticking to the three-ball rule, you scored higher than anyone else! We’re also really, really bad! You are getting better and better with knowing car names, car logos and now the makes of cars. When we’re driving, you’ll go “Ford. Honda. Mazda.” about all of the passing cars. You can tell what a brand new dinky car is just by the shape of it (which passes my knowledge of cars), proven the night that your uncle brought you a brand new yellow car, and your dad asked you, “look at this car and tell us what kind it is.” You studied the front (not seeing the logo) and confidently said, “Porche.” Easy. You’ve got a major collection of them now, and your favorite just happens to be a piece of crap plastic one with eyes that looks like it’s from the movie Cars. Of course. Thanks for that, Disney.
There were a few big snowstorms in the past couple of months, and you always love to come outside and help us with your little wooden shovel. Sometimes you last two minutes, sometimes 45. The snowstorm in the pictures below was the worst one of the year, and even though it doesn’t LOOK like that much snow, shovelling took us two hours!
Okay, here’s the parenting part of your newsletter, more importantly the breastfeeding part I know you’ll probably cringe at once you’re older: NO MORE NIGHT NURSING. We’re done! Kaput! Over! Finito!!! It was a loonnnng process to cut it out completely, but in the end, totally worth it and you are sleeping so much more soundly and I feel totally comfortable knowing that you had it for so long and I sacrificed so much sleep for your health for nearly 2.5 years, but I’m THRILLED that it’s over. It was hard on both of us, because you did get so sad when I first started trying to cut it out, and then you got so so so angry with me, but then you started getting used to being told no, not yet, soon, and eventually I stopped saying “soon” and just said no, and you didn’t complain, and then we were offically done with nursing after 7:30pm! You will still ask for it at least once while we’re sleeping, but I just say that the “milkies are sleeping” and you accept that pretty much without a fuss, and then we go back to sleep. Now, if I could get your hand away from cupping my boobs, I’d be happy!
You still nurse before bed, but we’re actually getting you to fall asleep without a boob in your mouth. Usually it’s with a dinky car or your two bears Cheswick and Maroon, I lay with you for a while after a short nursing session (there’s hardly any milk there, I don’t even let down anymore), and after a while I say, “one more minute and then I’m going to go” and you say “okay.” And then when I get up to go, you beg, “one more minute of cuddles!” and I stay for one more minute and then kiss you goodnight and tell you that I’ll be back soon and then we’ll cuddle all night long (to which you say, “yeah, cuddle all night long!”), and then you easily fall asleep alone, happy!
We bought you a big boy bed in February, and you started your night off in that bed, in your own room for about a week before you started fighting sleep so much that you wouldn’t go to sleep until 11pm. So, you’re not ready to leave the family bed. I’m a-ok with that, because the first night we started you off there I thought that I could keep you there until morning (theoretically) and you know what? I totally cried. So when it came time for me to go to bed, I picked you up, apologized to your dad, and brought you back into bed with me. The rest of the nights I promised you that I’d bring you back into the big bed again to help ease the transition, and you actually stopped fighting going to your big boy bed to sleep, but then as soon as you started refusing sleep, well, that was it for me. There’s plenty of time before you should sleep in your own bed, and I’m in no rush. Especially now that you’re sleeping all night long.
Last month we battled a pretty major flu. It kept you home from school for a week, and I think your dad was home from work for three days too. Your dad barfed on the floor, you just slept. The worst day was when you slept for 19 hours. You were awake from noon till 5pm, and that was it for the entire day. You didn’t talk, you didn’t move, you just sat or laid there. You did throw up once, and you did have a fever, but it was scary just because of how much you weren’t yourself. Seeing you ill is hard on everyone.
You can go to the bathroom by yourself now, you can pull your pants on and off, you even got changed into your pajama bottoms all by yourself this month, and even though it shouldn’t excite me this much, I was like, “HOLY MOTHER, ASH!!! You are AMAZING!!!”
Last month we did a few activities, like visiting the science center:
and go skating, which you liked just as much as you did last year:
and explore the icicles, which really are cool, even to me!
Now that the weather is warming up, I’m hoping we’ll have more days at the park, less time shovelling snow. I long for the days we spent at the playground, even though this winter was relatively snowless. You and I go to the library every week to pick up new books, which you listen to and memorize within two reads, and even though our weeks all tend to blend into one another, you never really seem bored. You really love to go to Value Village with your dad on Saturdays (and as a family on Sundays), you like to wade in the pool with me on Wednesdays (though you’re still pretty scared of the deep water and do not enjoy anything remotely like swimming), but we can’t wait to bring you to the lakes again, your dad wants to take you fishing, and it makes me realize how much of a little boy you are when I see you running and jumping and sliding down slides all by yourself now.
Your favorite foods are: raisins, cereal, goat’s cheese, kamut noodles (with tomato sauce or pesto), soy milk, mozzarella cheese, Vinta crackers, anything sweet, toast and tofu. You don’t eat a lot of vegetables. You’ve been taking a multi-vitamin for the past several months, and is always the first thing you in the morning, “Tiiiiiiime to geeeet uuuuuup. I want a bear vitamin!” and we’ve recently started you on some fish oil to get your omega 3s, because you weren’t getting them from any other source.
Your Nana keeps saying, “I can’t believe I’m having a conversation with him!” Sometimes, when I think about how far you’ve come, my mind is blown too. It’s gone by so fast, you’re such a big boy now, with real friends and likes and dislikes, with talents and interests. It’s so amazing to watch you grow and learn. You even spelled “up” last month. We were sounding out the word and I asked you which letters were in the word up and you said “U P!”
There aren’t two prouder parents than your dad and I.
Love,
Mama
Birth was never something that I was really passionate about. I didn’t study hypnobirthing, I didn’t want to have an orgasmic birth, I didn’t want a homebirth, I didn’t even really expect to have a drug-free birth. Sure, it was something to shoot for, but I looked at birth in my ever-realist way, and figured that I would probably end up getting an epidural, even though I really wanted to avoid it.
As extreme as my parenting beliefs are, I still am not that passionate about birth. Of course I believe that natural is the way to go, I would love to see doulas in every single delivery room and I strongly believe that birth has become far too medicalized. Nova Scotia has recently joined a lot of the rest of the country and has brought midwives out of private practice and into the hospitals, which I believe to be an incredibly positive move.
My birth story is just that, MY birth story. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, I bet a zillion other women have a variation of mine, labouring at home, going to the hospital, getting too tired to go on without drugs, getting an epidural, taking a nap, having the contractions slow down that the membranes are broken and then pitocin is administered, push push pushing, and then a healthy baby. But there are a few details in there that make my birth personal and I feel protective of those details. If anyone speaks at all negatively about what happened during my birth, I become defensive and private, even if they don’t mean to cross a boundry.
When I think about it, it reminds me of my frustration when I was first travelling through Europe: I was visiting all the same places that a hundred million other people had seen and photographed long before I. It felt unoriginal and I started to hate travelling altogether. It wasn’t until I was in Italy, my third country on that trip, when I was on a cliff overlooking Mt. Etna and the Mediterranean Sea that I realized that even though I was seeing all the same things as everyone else, I was the ONLY person in that space and time, and that meant something. From then on, my trip changed. I saw everything with a clear mind- it didn’t matter who had seen what before me, it was ME who was in that moment, no one else. It was a major paradigm shift, that before-comma-after moment that changed my life.
(Hence my comma tattoo. My silent pause.)
The same applies to my birth story. Countless women have given birth before me and after me, but it’s something so personal, something so emotional that I guard it and am sensitive about it. No two births are alike, but I suppose any medical professional or doula or midwife would end up having each family’s blend together, forgetting details, blurring everything, seeing it only as what it is, often without sparkle, even though for the person experiencing it, it is one of the most defining moments of their life.
I’m sure that the women who give birth at home and the women who ask for drugs as soon as they get through the hospital doors have a similar enlightening experience – as long as that’s what they wanted – and I guess there’s no saying which birth is “better” because the outcome is the same.
I will have a very medical birth with my next pregnancy (if there is one), because of the high risk nature of it. They’ll likely induce me at 37 weeks, I’ll have countless ultrasounds and bloodwork, none of which I want at all, but it won’t be up to me, it’ll be up to the health of the next baby. I will not be able to have a midwife like my pregnancy with Ash- which I think is the most upsetting thing- and who knows what the outcome will be, if my baby will be healthy or not. There’s a strong chance that he or she will not be.
That all said, I believe that one of my biggest tools for my birth with Ash was having a doula. My birth was higher on the medical (vs natural) scale, with my water being broken, laughing gas, pitocin, fetal monitors etc, but in my opinion would have been much, much more medical had it not been for my doula. It wasn’t she who threatened (“suggested”- for a less “sensationalized” word) a c-section if I didn’t push that baby out soon- it was the doctor. It wasn’t she who suggested an episiotomy, it was the nurse. It wasn’t she who came at me with a needle full of fentanyl, it was another doctor that I’d never met before. Instead, it was my doula who yelled at me to push harder, it was my doula who stood by me who made sure that no episiotomy was done, and it was my doula who informed me of the consequence of the fentanyl if it was administered. If it wasn’t for her things would have been much different, and in my opinion, much worse.
Here are the facts:
Having a doula with you while you are in labour:
I can only hope that medical professionals can learn something from doulas and midwives, that they too can have a paradigm shift back to believing that birth is a natural process, a process that our bodies are designed for. I know it’s falling on deaf ears, as the c-section rates in Canada and the US are only rising, but a girl can dream. I simply wish more women themselves would trust their bodies, to give birth and then to nourish their babies with their breasts… but that’s a whole different topic.
Clive and I are craving another adventure. We’ve been in talks about taking off and moving to another country (he’s got three passports, including a British one, which would allow us to live in many more places), talking about another all-inclusive vacation, or just going back to the BVI for a week camping on the beach. Vacationing with a kid is expensive because woe, you have to pay for them to come along. So it looks like it won’t be happening. Not when Clive has ideas of buying a new computer and I have dreams of being able to afford higher quality groceries.
But before Ash starts school in a couple of years, I’d love to take our little family on one last adventure before we really get settled into a school routine. I’d love to bring him to Africa, but it’d require vaccinations and you know how I feel about those. Though, we have waited more than two years now, and I wouldn’t feel AS bad now if I did have to vaccinate. If we are to stay in Canada I will continue to avoid any needles. I picked up a book at the library today called “The Parents’ Concise Guide to Childhood Vaccinations” which I’m going to read through to refresh my memory. It’s by the same author of Natural Baby and Childcare: Practical Medical Advice and Holistic Wisdom for Raising Healthy Children, a book that we carry at Nurtured.
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I keep putting off writing this month’s newsletter, so I think I’m going to have to make it a double digest (which reminds me of my beloved Archie comics) and just keep putting it off for another couple of weeks until Ash is an even 30 months old. I know you’re on the edge of your seats, I can feel your anticipation from here. Just hold on for just a little longer!
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Cutting out night nursing is going well, and Ash is happy as long as he can continue to fondle me, which irritates the hell out of me, but if it allows us more sleep than I’m okay with that for a little while longer. Soon I’m going to cut that out too, because seriously, getting felt up by a two year old is weird. There’s no denying he loves the boob. The past two nights he’s slept until 5am without waking up and asking for milk. We’ve also made the step to buying him his very own big boy bed and starting the night off in his own bed (more on that in a couple of weeks), which he hated at first, then got used to, and is now back to fighting- and it’s only been a week or so.
I’ve been interviewed a couple of times for Pip recently. Here’s the links!
Halifax Commoner
Studio M.M.E
A lot of snow fell overnight. Shoveling our driveway took 2.5 hours. Here’s the last 45 minutes, in 20 seconds.
All winter cowls are discounted!
My sustainable accessories company Pip Robins keeps me busy in the evenings.