One Bold Fashion Statement . . .

I think we need to be able to laugh at ourselves. Otherwise life is one long painful road. So I write this blog in the name of that spirit.

Today I had to run to the local grocery store for a few things.  I'm packing for a trip as well as doing laundry so I grabbed a strapless bra that I found at the bottom of the drawer that I never wear.  It had been a while.

As I made the two block walk to the grocery store I thought it felt a little loose and that I would tighten it up when I got home.  But as I did my shopping it kept slipping farther and farther. I tried to casually hoist myself up but I was in the grocery store over lunch hour and everywhere I looked there were dozens of construction workers and painters refueling for the afternoon. I couldn't find a quiet corner in the store anywhere.

The slippage kept getting worse.  At one point I looked down and thought I looked like a melted candle.  I could feel people watching me.  And while I was terrified it was going to fall all the way down to my waist, I kept shopping.  What else could I do?  Get my stuff and get out!  I put my shoulders back, filled my stomach with as much air as possible to prevent further sinking and gave people a look that said, "yes this is the new fashion trend and it's awesome!"

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I made it home until I went into the bathroom.  I took the phrase 'double breasted' to another level!  I looked hilarious!

And just as I fixed myself up I realized that I had forgotten the only thing on the list that I really needed. What can I say? I was flustered! I had to turn around and go back . . . Five minutes later I found myself walking through the doors with a slight blush on my cheeks.

Life lesson of the day.  Have a sense of humour, hold your head high . . . and buy a good bra!  HA! ✿ Micheline

The Taco Factory

Lately it seems like there is always been something going on . . . There have been business trips, problems at work, crazy-busy kid schedules, charity events and dinners, our son has had surgery, yep even our cat has had surgery . . . life.

Michael and I needed a night out, a date. Neither of us was up for formal, just fun.  I couldn't think of a better place than a restaurant I discovered with a girlfriend a few months ago in Palermo called La Fabrica Del Taco - The Taco Factory.

We spent our honeymoon year living in Mexico and have always loved Mexican food.  In Argentina, a spice averse land, it tends to be meager at best. But I found this little place off the Plaza Serrano that makes me feel like I'm in a Mexican taqueria. It's good.

As we walked up to this funky little spot on Saturday night, it was heaving.  We managed to squeeze into the last small table inside or out.  There were couples on dates and families.  A little girl danced the night away in the small space between the tables next to ours.

We tucked into margaritas made with real lime juice as well as plates of pico de gallo and guacamole with freshly made tortilla chips.  No, the salsa wasn't spicy but  there were four types of hot sauce and chilies waiting for us to season.  As for dinner we ordered tacos and used the tortillas chips to scoop the remaining pico de gallo and guacamole into our meal.  No cutlery required.  A perfect dinner.

The plaza at midnight was bursting with people. There wasn't a seat to be had in any cafe, ice cream parlour or restaurant. In a time when the world can't stop talking about the economy, Argentina shows no fear.  The world may fall apart tomorrow . . . but people are enjoying today. It's inspiring.

Cheers to that! Happy date night! ✿ Micheline

Cherries, Strawberries And Blueberries . . . Oh My!!!

I have been going to the same verdureria (green grocer) since we moved to the suburbs of Buenos Aires four and half years ago. The produce is so much better than going to the grocery store. One of my favourite days of the year is when I walk in and see cherries. That means summer has arrived.

Living in Argentina today reminds me of growing up in Canada in the 70s. We don't get imported food from all over the world, all the time. In the winter we eat a lot of apples, bananas and oranges. Potatoes, onions, cabbage and pumpkin are staple vegetables in the winter.  Tomatoes, some strawberries and cucumbers are grown in hot houses. Remember eating like that? We do get the odd pineapple or mango from Brazil but for the most part we eat what's grown in the region.

About the middle of September it does get boring but I try to take it in stride because it makes spring and summer all the more special.  Around the first of November I walk into my local verdureria and it's suddenly bursting.  Cherries, strawberries, blueberries, apricots, peaches, asparagus and artichokes lie heaving everywhere.  It's wonderful. I feel like a kid in a candy store.

The frig is full of all these delights today.  I know what I'm having for dinner tonight. It will be my annual cherry gorge! Yes I will have cherry belly tomorrow!

Happy Spring to all! ✿ Micheline

Bean Night

Some time ago I started meal planning. After years of feeling like dinner took me by surprise every night, only to have both kids complain about whatever I'd cooked didn't feel like a good long term strategy.  So during the week we have our five nights - red meat, chicken/fish, eggs, cheese and what we call "bean night". Bean night includes of course beans, but also legumes, grains and anything that I would call adventurous vegetarian.  Quesadilla and vegetable sticks do not count.

I'm not going to lie that bean night is the toughest sell of the week. This week I made Brazilian black beans. Colin did pretty well scooping up both the pork and beans, but I could tell that Meryn was quietly struggling. Now I realize that including pork with the beans might sound ironic, but as a young mom I'm trying to be realistic.  If cooking beans with pork sometimes helps to get the kids over the hump, then I'm in.

Each week I try to balance the tried and true with new recipes and more often than not when one of them likes something, the other does not. I swear that they have private meetings about this during recess at school. Colin loves both lentil and roasted pumpkin soup. Meryn for some reason can't seem to cope well with any soup. I have no idea why?

With time I am starting to hit on a few mutual likes including polenta, soba noodles and a couple of weeks ago braised lentils with sausage. They were delicious!

 More importantly than any one week, the kids had accepted that bean night is here to stay. Compared to their whinging from a year ago they are at least open to trying new things today. As a mom, I'm happy . . . ✿ Micheline

Happy Birthday Liana!

A couple of months ago Liana turned 35. It's an understatement to say there was a party.

The theme was red carpet . . . of course it was! Michael and I arrived dressed up and looking good on a cold winter night. We were greeted to lots of fancy dress, a red carpet and a huge gold Oscar statue! After a big hug we took photos with the very happy birthday girl who was dressed to the nines.

From the red carpet we worked our way into the back garden. Liana and Jules made a last minute dash to put up tents with heaters as it was a cold, wet night to be outside.The DJ was playing.  Espumante was flowing. People were having a good time.

My favourite part of the evening was watching her girls. They were all dressed up and flitting around the fiesta like two little fairies.  It was their job to hand out glow sticks to the guests.  Little Emma took her job seriously and would evaluate the guests as they walked by.  I could see her mentally saying, "no, no, no, yes . . . " and then she'd hand over a glow stick.  Thankfully I was one of the chosen ones and I wore my glow stick with pride.  So was Michael.    

There was a speech and lots of dancing, barefoot dancing which is the best kind.  I was in my bed by three but I know many others stayed until six.  What a night . . . I think more than one of us ended up cupping Oscar's irresistible bum (or using him for air guitar) before it was all over. He was tipsier than he looked. Oooops!

Happy Birthday girl!  I hope that 35 is great! ✿ Micheline

Cooking In The Bathroom?!

For three years I went to the same esthetician for facials. It was the first gift of time I gave to myself after I became a mom. Because I have such acne prone skin I need to feel a sense of trust with anyone who touches my skin. I'm very loyal. So when I called to make an appointment a few months ago and she had moved away I was gutted! I always looked forward to my facials every eight weeks.

I still haven't found anyone to replace Lila yet. I know I will eventually but in the meantime I have taken to playing with my own facials at home. I alternate between using a commercial product that I trust and natural ones. I love mixing honey and sugar and putting that on my face as my kids take their evening bath.  Honey is great is great for both aging and acne prone skin (bring it on!) and the sugar acts as a natural exfoliator.   Other days I find myself letting an egg white dry on my face or calming my skin with a mixture of plain yogurt and oatmeal. I'm trying to get Meryn in on the action. She has difficult to manage (but gorgeous curly hair) and every couple of weeks she comes to me and says, "Mom I think I need the olive oil." We put her in the tub and cover her curls in olive oil while she has a good soak. It melts away all the tangles and leaves her hair looking gorgeous. 

I like using these ingredients so much that I have taken to keeping honey, sugar, salt and olive oil up in our bathroom for various facials, scrubs and hair treatments. When I walk out of the bathroom now with honey dripping off my face the kids don't even flinch. They just roll their eyes a little at me and smile.  

Mother Nature - inexpensive, easy and healthy. If it's not broke, don't fix it!  ✿ Micheline

Ommmmmmmm!

Over the last few years I made a mental list of changes I wanted to make.  I've worked hard and made a lot of progress but there is endless room for improvement.

I have always been interested in the idea of meditation. I do believe there is a mind/body connection. If we feel good on the inside that has to shine through.

Yet I keep skirting the issue.  I have found time for many other things, but meditation keeps evading me. I don't really know why?  Maybe I'm afraid of something . . .  As I mentioned in an earlier blog I started running nearly a year ago and feel that has become a form of meditation for me. I am able to let my mind go while jogging and I feel calmer for it. But why is it that I can't take ten or twenty minutes a day and just sit without a distraction.  I don't have the answer.  

I am not giving up. First I know I need a time of the day that works. If I make it a routine I'm more likely to stick to it. I know that. I finally decided post workout, pre-shower is the best for me.  I am going to try and take a few moments to just sit quietly in my room without music or TV or my computer or telephones and to be still.  It's harder than it sounds.  Yesterday I made it for five minutes before I opened my eyes and looked at the clock. Five minutes! Seriously that's all I could do? That's terrible! It felt like an eternity!  I sound like Colin, "how much longer Mommmmmm!"  

Ok so meditation (and a shower) are calling me now.  Six minutes . . . can I do it? ✿ Micheline

A Spooky Hallowe'en

spooky cookies

I'm not normally an over the top kind of girl but this year I fancied a big kids Hallowe'en party. I asked the kids to make a list and we invited twenty kids to come over to our house after school on the Friday before Hallowe'en, the day they celebrated at school.

Normally I involve the kids when we plan events. They help to plan menus and to decorate the house with me.  But this time I wanted them to be surprised.  It drove Meryn crazy. She kept asking why she couldn't help to organize the party. I urged her to just enjoy the day. It's not her strong suit; she's a planner just like her momma!

On Hallowe'en Friday we set off to school from a very normal looking house.  Meryn and Colin were dressed as Hermoine and Ron from Harry Potter. We've been reading the books for the past year and they are both hooked on the world of Hogwart's.  We even dyed Colin's hair red for the occasion.  He looked awesome!

I stayed to participate in the Hallowe'en parade around the school and to enjoy a quick breakfast in Colin's classroom afterward. And then I dashed home!  I had exactly six hours to make magic happen!

First up were the decorations. I had been collecting and storing decorations for the previous few weeks in our storage room.  This is no mean feat in Argentina a country not known for it's Hallowe'en celebrations.  Luckily (and sadly) I have a fellow expat friend who is moving and I was able to buy a ton of Hallowe'en decorations from her that she had collected for years. I also stumbled on one cotillon (the local name for a party supply store) in Buenos Aires that put up an amazing collection of spooky decorations. We were set.

I spent the next couple of hours transforming our house in a spooky enclave. There was the three foot wide spider made of Christmas lights that scuttles around the floor, an owl and a cat with glow-in-the- dark eyes and a gravestone that lifts out of the ground. I put up bats and skeletons and ghosts.  There were cobwebs everywhere. Our house has security shutters which I lowered to make it as dark as night and completed the effect with two black lights.  I also downloaded spooky Hallowe'en sounds and played them continuously on the stereo. It looked and sounded eerie.

Then I got started on the food. It had to be oooouchy, as my kids would say. A couple of days beforehand I spent a day in the kitchen to hammer out some of the more time consuming foods. I made gingerbread men and decorated them to look like skeletons. I baked cupcakes.  Once the kids were in school I decorated them to look like brains.  I just tinted white icing a light orange colour and made squiggly lines for an icky effect! Tasty . . .  I also made homemade strawberry lemonade and added raisins and gummy worms into the pitchers to make it look buggy. I knew that the kids were all having class parties during the day so I put out a huge vegetable tray and for a finale I made hot dog mummies.  They were hot dogs wrapped in strips of dough that looked as though they were mummified! Very cute and easy.  

Ouuuchy Treats

The third element of the party were the games.  The first game was just enjoying the "haunted-ness" of the house.  Once I led the kids through the house I sat them down had them stick their hands into bowls of unknown origin  . . . guts (jello), brains (spaghetti) and eyeballs (peeled grapes).  While the house was still dark we played monster freeze dance. The kids loved whooooping it up to songs like Thriller, Ghostbusters and the Monster Mash.  Our living room was a heaving disco!

At this point they needed food and we turned on the lights to find the feast that was already set out on the dining room table and waiting for them.  They loved it!  After we ate they bobbed for apples (and they ate those too . . .) and then they spent the rest of the afternoon running relay races and playing dodge ball in their half disheveled costumes.

One by one the kids filtered home. They parted with trick or treat bags filled with candy from Canada that Michael brought back from a business trip. I'm not sure who had a harder time parting with that, us or the kids. The last girls to leave were Liana's.  Liana and Jules were away for the weekend playing polo and the girls came with their grandma.  When I came back from letting kids out, I found our four kids playing games in the backyard with her.  Is there anything better?  They were as happy as little clams.

Michael was able to sneak away from the office early and came into the scene around the bobbing of the apples.  Later that evening when everyone was gone he said to me, "you know you need to do this every year now . . . "

I can't wait!  Happy Hallowe'en! ✿ Micheline

A spooky spider in the dark . . . 

Working Together

Getting ready to try polo

As we finished the end of the school year last year Liana became the president of our local international women's group. She asked me to be her vice-president.  I said yes. We work well together and make a great team.  Liana with her contacts and her outgoing personality is the lead singer.  I'm her back-up dancer and happy to do it.

I always love to see what Liana is going to cook up for a monthly meeting. Last month we hosted the meeting in a spectacular house and garden north of Buenos Aires.  After some yummy food and time to chat Liana kicked off the meeting with an outdoor fashion show of a famous swimsuit designer in Argentina. The swimsuits were beautiful and the models who were both in their forties were stunning and an inspiration to all of us that it can be done.

From the fashion show we went straight into a talk from a polo estancia that encourages people to stay with them and to play polo recreationally. Argentina is one of the few places in the world where it's possible and as Liana says, "if you live here you just have to do it!" After a few minutes of talk about the estancia we were invited to spring into action. They brought professional polo players, sticks and balls and stools to stand on. We were able to go out into the garden and give it a go. How fun!

After trying to give the ball a good whack a few times I stood back to watch the scene. That in itself was really good fun. A polo stick is very long.  It's no mean feat to swing it 360 degrees around and I loved hearing the women have a giggle at themselves. Up on the terrace people were eating and chatting and the bathrooms were lined up with women trying on swimsuits.  A few even modeled for the group.

Everywhere I looked people were having a good time.  They kept coming up to me and saying that they felt like they'd been to a party.  And they had.  It may have been a Thursday afternoon but with Liana at the helm it doesn't matter, a good time is always in the cards.

I can imagine the dinner tables that night as happy Moms enthused to their families about their afternoon. Polo, swimsuits, good food and friends . . . does it get any better? ✿ Micheline

Trying My Hand At Polo

Learning To Love . . . Running

5000 Women Running In Buenos Aires

At the beginning of the year I decided to learn to run. I was already exercising. But I had never, ever run. I don't think I even ran when I was a kid! For some reason I told myself that I couldn't and distinctly labelled myself as a 'non-runner'. But I'd always envied people who would casually drop into conversations that they were heading out for a run or were training for a race. It sounded cool.

With the writing of the book well underway I felt like I could take on the world and recruited a couple of friends to train with. There was a five kilometre race for women coming up in the city and it felt like a reasonable goal to strive for. My plans were to train, to run the race, to check it off the to-do list and then to never run again. I didn't want to feel like I couldn't run any longer. I wanted to feel like I chose not to. There's a difference.  

I'll be honest when I say that learning to run in the middle of the summer in Buenos Aires was hideous. We ran along the river early in the mornings but it was still extremely hot and humid. I got through it by day dreaming of every other exercise I could be doing in the comfort of air conditioning - Pilates, yoga, aerobics and spinning all ran through my mind. Good music and girlfriends were vital.

Over the course of several weeks I slowly built up from half walking/half running to actually running, okay well jogging. When our race day came we were as ready as we could be.  We ran on a beautiful summer day with five thousand other women in the parks of Palermo while wearing cute matching race shirts.  I finished the race in a respectable thirty-three minutes and loved the sensation of crossing the finish line. It felt fantastic.

I didn't run for several weeks afterward and went back to my regular aerobics classes. I thought that was it. But then something happened that surprised me. I found myself thinking about running. I missed it. I did not see that coming.

I started running again and have grown to love it. I don't run far or fast. I do a thirty minute run on the treadmill three times a week. Some mornings I wake up and I'm tired. I think to myself, " . . .  am I really going to do this today?" But then I get going.  The first five minutes are slow but everything loosens up and at some point I realize that my mind is able to wander. Running has become a form of meditation for me.

I won't run forever and I'll never run a marathon. It's too hard on the body. Coming from a family where a number of people have had knee and hip replacements I know that I have to take care of my joints. But for today I'll keep on enjoying my morning runs. They make me feel strong and calm, both of which make me a better mother.

Keep on moving! ✿ Micheline