a peek inside the fishbowl

I might be exaggerating but when we dropped the youngest off at kindergarten she cried every morning for months, possibly years. While the photos above may show otherwise, I don’t think we had a truly smooth drop-off until second grade. It broke my heart every day to leave behind a crying kid. Teachers assured me that she stopped as soon as I left but I always had a sneaking suspicion they were just saying that to make me feel better.

Well this kindergarten kid is all grown up now and she’s back to school this week, but this time as a masters student in the art history department at Queen’s. I suspect there were fewer tears than there were back in kindergarten. ;)

My friends’ Facebook feeds have been chock full of back-to-school photos and it’s all left me thinking about how far we’ve come here at Casa Fishbowl, and how strange it is to know someone from conception until adulthood and spot the patterns in their lives that add up to The Person They Have Become.

A small part of me is tempted to take some credit for her reaching this amazing post-secondary milestone. Is this weird of me to say out loud? We were the family who encouraged home art projects, bought memberships to the National Gallery and planned kid-friendly visits, and dropped by open houses of local artist studios and collectives. But we can’t truly take much credit at all – her success is truly her own. She studied for her exams and got good grades. She got the internships, jobs, scholarships and grants. She winged interviews because she’s smart that way. She put herself out there more times than I can count, and the universe rewarded her hard work and her courage. As parents, we may have given her a pair of oars, pointed the boat and given it a shove, but she’s the one who has been doing all the rowing.

Mark and I are so proud of how hard our kid has worked and how far she’s come. We are excited to see what’s in store for her.

I’m writing this from the sofa as I recover from COVID. I feel like my brain hasn’t quite been restored to full capacity but on the whole I am ok. Recovery has been two-steps-forward/one-step-back but I think I’m finally on the mend. 

This was my first time getting Covid. Honestly, I can’t believe I managed to hold out this long. Catching Covid is different for everyone, I think. How sick you get seems to depend on so many things: Your age, overall health, whether you’re vaccinated or not. My Covid was like having the flu, but with all sorts of other fun symptoms thrown into the mix like some kind of bad joke. Like many, I was achy, but not just regular muscle ache: I had eyeball and dental pain and weird muscle spasms in my rear end and in my legs. I lost my sense of taste too, which was probably one of the most depressing symptoms, at the very least, on par with the eyeball ache. Mark went and bought me some of my favourite foods to tempt me to eat but I tell ya, there’s nothing sadder than biting into a tomato sandwich at the height of summer and having it taste like… nothing. It is so strange to lose your sense of taste, because when you lose your ability to taste you also lose the joy that comes with eating. The texture was there, as was the temperature of the food and some sense of whether what I was eating is salty or sweet, but otherwise I might as well have been eating cardboard.

My sense of taste has returned now but there was a weird in-between time where I really had to think about what I was eating. 

This pizza… am I tasting it, or is it the memory of pizza I am tasting?

Anyway, I was totally bummed to find myself out of commission during last week’s perfect weather, and now this, the long weekend. Ugh. Even though it’s stinkin’ hot outside right now there are things I wanted to do. I did not want to be holed up here at home during the last few weeks of the season with a summer to-do list that remains incomplete. Sigh. I will deal.

In other news, it is back to school season. Why, Andrea, you might be thinking, aren’t ya’ll done with school? As it turns out, we are, but also, not really. More about that coming soon.

I have fallen way behind on my summer reports but I promise to get back to it once things calm down around here a little bit. In the meantime I will say this… if you’re looking for something fun to do I 100% recommend renting e-bikes and tooting around town. We went to Petrie Island and it was lovely. More soon!