Sunday, February 1, 2009

Looking Around

We'll start with dinner and then I will ramble. Post long drive home today we bought some fixins and I made garlic sausage pasta sauce with garlic bread. Mushrooms, green peppers, onions and zucchini. Garlic sausage, garlic, can of crushed and can of diced tomatoes. Onions, mushrooms and sausage were browned/sweated on low heat till the onions were almost transparent. Then the other veggies and the diced tomatoes were added in and cooked down till they started to thicken up. Next I threw in the crushed toms and spices and let it simmer for another 20 minutes or so. In the end I was really happy with where I ended up. Bow tie pasta and the wife's instant salad rounded things out. Good dinner. So that was dinner.

The drive that was finished was the return leg of our last trip to Vancouver before B-day. We have to go and visit the midwives next week on Friday but that is just more practice for B-day. This imminent arrival of B-day makes me think of Ferris Buehler. Perhaps Matthew Broderick was channeling his experience in Max Dugan returns when he took on the role of Ferris. He is actually quite a philosopher in his role as high school messiah. The line of I am thinking of is possibly the last line of the movie before the post script that comes after the credits. The last line of the movie is I believe, "life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might miss it." He's right. With all the fretting and worrying I do over the little things that make up my everyday I rarely raise my eyes to the horizon andreally look at where I am.

We are about to have our third child. Our family is going to grow and change. Again. A friend of mine once related being quite worried and possibly a little annoyed about the approaching arrival of their second child. Who was this person coming into their perfect little threesome and messing it up. There is no regret now but at the time it is hard to see where life is going to take you. I have been feeling that a little bit. But like Ferris says, I need to just enjoy my life for what it is right now. My son sitting in my lap pressing random butons on thw key board and holding my hands whjile I triy to typ[e. Notice I am not yellihjng at him yet but hysi is realya mess8ihgn withh wwhat I am tryingb toi do.d Bratl .d

After tickling him and having a brief transformer discussion I am back. Where was I. Oh yeah, savouring life as it happens rather than looking back or looking forward. We had a great weekend at the coast. Spent two nights just hanging at my mom's place, even if the Canucks lost. Got to sit and chat with my sisters and they in turn got to get their fill of playing with the kids. On Saturday I was talking with a colleague at the conference I was attending. We had a great discussion about teaching and life. He is an older guy but I really enjoy talking to him as we really seem to get down to brass tacks quickly. Something he came up with, or I came out with upon reflection was, "Communication and relationships take work and will always take work." He talked about being married for 30 years and still working on the communication thing everyday. This brought me around to the fact that I don't work on my communication with my siblings or my mom. I talked about how I take these relationships for granted and that a lot of the friction that comes from these relationships probably comes from not working on my understanding of who my family are as individuals right now. They are all sort of frozen from the time when I was say, 20. This is not an accurate depiction of who these individuals are today. The more I talked with that colleague the more we came to the conclusion that this is probably a major part of the problems that people have in their familial relationships. The assumption that people are who you think they are rather than understanding that to have a relationship you need to be constantly working on improving how you know and relate to the other person.

I don't know if it is the coming of the third child or the impending mid life crisis but there sure seem to be a lot of important ideas just floating around right now. Has anyone else noticed this? I sure hope I can figure out how they all fit together. Well everyone else is making bubbles in the bath and I have work to do. I wonder how many days this family of four has left. Hmmmm...

1 comment:

von grudegin said...

oh geez you are cute. I think that you are too hard on yourself. You don't really see me the way you saw me when you were twenty. I was twelve for pete's sake. Maybe it's that we don't talk very often but I thought our communication and understanding of each other was quite good. hummm....