Monday, November 19, 2001
I got a call from Erika late this morning saying that Uncle John had called, and was worried about the state of my Mother’s health. This was following a similar call from my Aunt Edith Sunday morning, who hadn’t heard from my Mother in a couple of weeks. Here’s the email I ended up sending to my Uncle after making a bunch of calls:
I finally got through to my mother a few minutes ago. She sounds fine, though it seems as though she had a bad episode yesterday, and I urged her to go see her local doctor to get checked out. I have also spoken to her friend Morris, who has seen her today already, and may now offer her a lift to the doctor's. Could you do me a favour and let Cec and Edith know this information too? Edith called me yesterday saying she hadn't heard from my Mother after giving her a couple of calls over the past two weekends. Turns out last week she was on an overnight stay with friends, and yesterday morning (before the bad spell) she was at a friend's funeral. ... Will keep you updated with more news as I get it.
The “bad episode” may have been in a mild heart attack from the way she described it, which has me concerned. I got her to promise that she’d see the doctor over the course of the day, and called her friend Morris as "backup" on this (my Mom too often shrugs such things off). Will call tonight and see what’s up, and perhaps head up to Keswick to “hold her hand” if anything is found wrong.
Our Lazy Day to the Zoo
Erika and I somehow misjudged when The Wiggles concert was going to be. We checked the tickets on Saturday morning, and discovered that they were for Sunday afternoon, not Saturday as we had been thinking. So I agreed to take Vanessa to the Metro Zoo, so Erika could have her much needed traditional Saturday “break”. Besides, we’re members, and Vanessa has been apparently been begging to go there for a while, so the Zoo it was!
Things got off to a pretty lazy start. Instead of heading out first thing, I dallied, and we headed over to Lick’s for lunch sometime after noontime. This went down well, though by the time we ended up at the Zoo using public transit it was just after 2pm. We headed “left” after getting on the grounds, which took us to the majority of indoor exhibits, including the Asia/Malayan pavilion and the Africa pavilion. Vanessa says she had the most fun watching the monkeys, though she spent an inordinate amount of time looking at a crocodile (an Asian Ghial who has a very toothy smile) who moved around its relatively small enclosure it shared with a bunch of turtles. Another highlight of the trip was watching the elephants. They were playing some sort of social game: five were outside, and one seemingly shy smaller elephant dallied between being inside and out. At some point I gather the doors to the building had been opened, and the 5th elephant got the others to come inside. All of them went in quickly, save for one mare who seemed to tarry outside relatively close to where we were standing, seemingly showing off that she was in no real rush to get in like all of the others. Vanessa had a good time sitting on my shoulders taking all of this in over the 15 or so minutes it took for the events to unfold. We also got the chance to see some of the new exhibits. For me the most impressive was the chiclid wrap-around aquarium display in the Africa pavilion. There was an obligatory thing about the admittedly fascinating evolutionary history of the chiclids (described as the ichthyological “Darwin’s Finches of Victoria Lake”), put the display of all these colourful fishes in a floor-to-ceiling aquarium was mesmerizing.
Made one significant find at the Zoo shop: a copy of Dr. Suess’ “Horton Hatched an Egg”, which oddly enough I’ve never run across in the kids books section at the various book stores I frequent. So I snapped that up for future bedtime reading, along with a rubber whale for Vanessa’s bath-time play, and some treats for Vanessa (indulgent Dad strikes again! ;-)
Maxim-o-rama
Shortly after I got home, we fetched Maxim – a neighbour and friend of Vanessa who is roughly her age – over to our house for a sleep-over. This was a first for both Maxim and for Vanessa, and both were thrilled to bits about it. After feeding them dinner, they both rushed up to her room and proceeded over the course of the next day to pretty much tear it apart. Maxim had occasional troubles with the differences in the way we do things in our house as at home – the most commonly-heard complaint was “well, my Momma let’s me do [fill in the blank]”. ;-) On the whole though, he was pretty good, and while Erika put them to bed sometime around 7:30 or so, I could still hear them chatting to each other and playing until about 9:30pm or so, when they finally conked out. The best remark I overheard on the audio monitor in Vanessa’s room during this time: a tired-sounding Vanessa after something went “crash” saying “Stupid boy”. I relieved Erika for the night while she went over to Maxim’s mother’s place to watch “Bridget Jones’ Diary” – very much a “chick flick”. Since Annie was fast asleep, I got to do some writing for The Computer Paper, and caught part of a fascinating movie that featured sketches from The Pythons, Beyond the Fringe members, and The Goodies on Showcase.
The next morning they woke up – early! Maxim has to get up early in order to catch the school-bus for his school, so the two kids woke up a good couple of hours earlier than Vanessa normally would by herself. This wasn’t unexpected, but still, Erika and I were pretty groggy. I made everybody waffles in the morning, though the two excited kids deeked out after a few bites apiece and ended up spending much of the morning up in Vanessa’s room. I played with them for part of the morning, but drew a line when Maxim insisted on punching me after he got too excited. I gave the reigns over to Erika and I did more writing for The Computer Paper (and managing to get my latest installment of the Web Weaving series put to bed).
Seeing The Wiggles
At about 1pm, with Maxim having left an hour or so before, I took Vanessa to see The Wiggles at The Hummingbird Centre. Thanks to the Toronto Santa Claus parade, what would have normally have been a half-hour streetcar ride took an hour, and even then I opted to get out at Church and Queen when I realized I could walk to the Centre faster than the slow crawl the streetcar was making due to diverted traffic (and an idiot traffic cop at Church who essentially followed the traffic lights, backing up westward traffic for blocks). Vanessa was already tired, and fell fast asleep on my shoulder on the ride over. So I ended up taking a groggy and teary Vanessa into The Hummingbird Centre with only minutes to spare before showtime. The place was packed, and we got the only seats Erika was able to snag at the time: row YY seats 5 and 6, which is one row back from ZZ, which is at the very top part of the balcony seating. So The Wiggles were somewhat distant, but still the show was fun, if short. The first set ran for maybe half-an-hour, which was followed by a 20 minute intermission, which was followed by another half-hour or so. The antics were fun for the kids (and for a lot of the adults, some of whom seem to be disturbingly fervent fans), though I was disappointed with the reliance on pre-taped music that The Wiggles sang and danced too – I would have liked more “live” musicianship, but maybe I’m just being stupid on this point -- this is a kid's show after all. For me, the best part was seeing Capt. Feathersword doing seemingly impromptu renditions of the "Duck Duck" song as song by other entertainers: his versions of the song as done by Michael Jackson, Pavarotti and a swaggering Mick Jagger thrilled the adults, and probably sailed right over the heads of the kids. His antics were easily the best received -- never under-estimate the power of slapstick on kids. ;-)
Vanessa didn’t really get into things until the second act, primarily because she was still waking up during the first act. During intermission I bought her a small plush Dorothy. Not my first choice, since I would have rather have got her a cassette or CD of theirs instead, but they didn’t have any to sell. Vanessa was very happy with her Dorothy dinosaur though, and she danced and played with it during the second act. It wasn’t cheap: $15 for a plush animal which was maybe worth a third that price, though I was impressed that they seemed to have imported it directly from Australia. On the whole, I felt the performance was lackluster and too short – much better suited to a smaller venue than the one they played.
Talk about timing though – when we left The Hummingbird Centre there was Santa from the Santa Claus parade going by on his float! I lifted Vanessa up on my shoulders so she could see the climax of the parade going by. I dreaded what this would mean for getting back though – a very clogged bus and subway ride later, we got home sometime around 5pm, at least an hour after we exited the Centre.
I was exhausted by the end of this and ended up crashing out early for the night...
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
