Post Party Parenting
I am awake in a chair by a window bouncing another smaller chair with my foot. The window brings in a strong malevolent light which pains my eyes. Inside the smaller chair resides the beast. She is somewhat spastic in her small chubby arms but her eyes are wide and seemingly calm as she rocks back and forth in my field of vision. Watching her rock makes me somewhat nauseous, so I am doing my best to avoid prolonged visual appraisal of her changeable emotional states.
The reason for this nausea was an old fashioned piss-up at the wedding of my good friends Tim Haltigin and Melissa Trottier at which, though more reasonable than usual, I nonetheless tied one on. Now when you are a member of a parental unit charged with the care of an extremely small baby, sleep is sought as a precious commodity; snatched from the arms of babes so to speak. What this means for me presently is that when you go out till 1 AM drinking, you will pay many times over over the next few days as you struggle to regain some of the sleep while managing hangover and various life responsibilities (work, and sundry other chores and duties of life).
I am now at the bottom of the sleep chasm, trying to roll the rock of hangover up the hill of duty. The jungle is dense, and there are naked, painted babies in the branches shooting blow-darts. Some of the babies have dug pits to trap and waylay. Other babies have trained tigers to chase and terrify.
It is not entirely a good place to be.
Ultimately, I would assume, it forces you to willingly accept that the day of the great piss-up are numbered.
Isabelle too fought the good fight last night - though in a responsible modern parental fashion involving a ritual known as pumping and dumping. Nonetheless as the holder of the milk, she is more frequently set upon by tigers in the forest of the night. I have now relieved her, but she will sleep a scant 2 hours before the beast again summons her.
So as I rock the beast, I thought I would make a quick update on the old blog. I am struggling to keep this thing up to date as I struggle to maintain other aspects of my personal life, but the battling through the jungle obliges, and best laid plans are quickly sabotaged by traumatic bowel movements...
Most recently, we hosted Jacky and her boyfriend Guillaume for 10 days of: sell the boyfriend on the merits of Canada. On the whole it went pretty well as we plied him with new world wines and took him to the Canadian north for some canoeing - during which time we deployed, for the first time in my life, the tarp sail and created a sailing catamaran (loads of fun, but very difficult with a strong side wind).
Pics of all this have been duly uploaded in the gallery section.
Wedding last night was extremely impressive. My buddy Tim got the announcer from the Montreal Canadiens to do the head table introductions and I helped him put it together mixing the Cold Play loop underneath and adding a little reverb to get it as close as possible to the players introductions at the Bell Centre - clip below gives and example from the 07-08 playoffs (game 1 against Boston at which I was in attendance and was probably one of the most incredible starts to a hockey game I have ever witnessed).
I'll try to upload the clip from the wedding on to the site pending bride and groom's permission.
In other news, I am finally hunkering down this August to put the finishing touches on a recording project I have been working on.
What the final form will look like, and how/when it will be released are still up in the air, but I am keen to get this thing off my back as I have been working almost a year on it on and off. Anyways, keep your eye on this space for more details as August progresses into September.