But even though we both played absolutely awful, it was a lot of fun just having that one on one time with Wesley.  We walked instead of taking a cart so it was good exercise too, and the weather could not have been better. I just love having time with Wes where we can talk and joke around and really connect over something we have in common.

I too used to work at the wolf.  In grade 9 and 10 I spent the summers and many fall days after school at the golf course, picking the driving range and washing down golf carts.  So being at Wolf Creek always takes me back so vividly to many memories from those times, some good and others not so much.  It’s incredible how memories of things I’d completely forgotten about, from 13 years ago, can suddenly seem so clear after going back to the place where they happened and recognizing the little details, the smells, the sounds, and all the tiny things the brain leaves out when it fabricates a place in your mind from the limited materials of a distant memory.  Even the wash bay behind the tee box on hole #1 where I’d washed hundreds and hundreds of carts, looked exactly as it did 13 years ago.  The hose wrapped up and hung just like it always was, and the same garbage barrels in the same place.  It was like going back in time.

So what does all this make me think about?  Well, as cliche and predictable as it may be, it makes me feel like I’ve grown up a lot in the last 13 years.  I no longer feel so easily intimidated and unsure of myself.  Walking through the places where I’d let myself be bullied and teased, I now look back on it all with so much more understanding.  I no longer feel I have anything to prove to anyone, and I realize also some of the reasons why my peers tortured me the way they did.  I don’t feel any regret or animosity over those memories.  Just an acceptance of it all as part of the journey that brought me to where I am now.

And then, after staying up until 3:30am last night working on a FarmOn video that I was supposed to have worked on in the afternoon, I was awoken at 8:30 this morning by my pager again.  A farm shop on fire near Fernitosh, my first structural fire.  On the way out, Mike and I got into full BA gear in the back of the rescue van (BA = Breathing Apparatus).  When we got to the scene, the Ferintosh fire department already had the fire mostly under control, but there were some trusses still burning in the attic near where the fire originated, and we had to help them remove the metal siding of the building to gain access to the attic and fight the fire from within.  It was pretty exciting going into a smoke filled building in full BA for the first time, and the work was pretty tiring, moving ladders and siding and carrying hose.  It sure feels good to know you’re doing something that makes a difference to the community, and I do love the adrenaline rush when you’re heading out to an emergency with the sirens blaring.  But, I really felt bad leaving Kelly to take care of Aubrey by herself two days in a row, plus the time away from FarmOn work when we’re right in the middle of some really important and time sensitive stuff.

They say bad things come in threes, so it makes me wonder what might happen tomorrow.  If the pager does go off again, I just hope that like yesterday and today, nobody is seriously hurt or killed.  As for the driver of the gravel truck that was hit by the train yesterday, it was a miracle that he survived.  The cab of the truck was pushed about 500 or 600 feet down the track before it finally stopped, and it was an unrecognizable ball of twisted metal when we got to him, yet he was so alert he kept saying “guys I think I can walk out to the road”.  Unbelievable.

Thus began our marathon day of hospitals and waiting rooms.  The first doctor at the clinic in Lacombe said there was nothing he could give her for the phlegm and congestion, but he wanted to see what could be causing the regular projectile vomiting, so he phoned up a pediatrician in Red Deer for a consultation.  They agreed she should have an ultrasound on her stomach as soon as possible to check the development of her pylorus, the opening from the stomach to the intestine.  If it is overdeveloped or too tight, food can’t pass into the intestines and it all eventually comes up.  Pyloric stenosis can cause weight loss and failure to thrive, and requires surgery to correct it, so even though it wasn’t very likely it was important to check for it.  (If you’ve seen Aubrey lately, you’d agree she’s at a very low risk of failing to thrive. lol)

So off to Red Deer we went.  The wait actually wasn’t too long before we got in for her ultrasound, however, nobody told us until we were in the room that we weren’t supposed to feed her.  Kelly had just nursed her, so her tummy was so full of milk they couldn’t see a thing.  The tech took pictures of her other organs though, to check proper development.  It was really amazing seeing her tiny little kidneys, spleen, heart and liver.  Then they sent us away for a couple hours to let her belly drain out.  We had lunch, did a little shopping and then returned to find them packing up to leave for home!  The tech agreed to stay and do the scan though, but again it was too obscured by food for a diagnosis.  They then phoned the first Dr in Lacombe who suggested we go to the ER at the Lacombe hospital.  We were never told why, just that we should go.

At this point it had been several hours of running around with no answers and we didn’t know what to expect next.  The wait was longer at Lacombe as other emergency patients came in with various injuries and ailments.  There was a boy 8 months old who had been hit in the head by something and his screaming and crying just broke our hearts.  But soon it would be our own child screaming.  The nurses weighed her in at a whopping 12lbs, like I said, definitely not failing to thrive.  And then after another wait they took us down the hall for an x-ray of her stomach, since the ultrasound couldn’t reveal anything.  We weren’t expecting anything traumatic, but then the nurse told me I couldn’t come into the room, only one person allowed.  And Kelly had to help the nurse put Aubrey into the most horrible looking device to hold her still.  Picture a miniature bicycle seat with a clear plastic cylinder above it.  She had to sit on this seat, with her arms raised straight up and the plastic tube cinched tight around her torso so she couldn’t move.  I have never heard Aubrey cry like that in her life, and I had to wait outside the room not even knowing what was happening.  When I came in and saw the tears streaming down her face it made me want to cry too.  I knew they weren’t actually hurting her, but she was terrified. Aubrey is a baby who very rarely cries.  When she does, it’s almost only from being really hungry or from being cold when she’s taken out of the bath.  That’s about it.  And those infant cries seem almost subconscious, like she’s not actually crying but just letting us know she needs something.  This crying was different.  These were real tears.  My baby girl is now so much more aware of her surroundings, and her mind is developing so fast, she was experiencing very real feelings of fear and of abandonment by the two people she loves and trusts the most.  We felt so terrible.

The ER Doctor on call, by far the nicest doctor we’d dealt with all day, finally prescribed her with some medicine for acid reflux, and said she’d call us if the pediatrician was concerned with anything in the x-rays but pyloric stenosis was very unlikely.  So finally we were allowed to go.  The pharmacy took almost an hour to make up her medicine, and we got home at about 9pm, 10.5 hrs after we’d left home that morning.

As awful as it was hearing my baby cry, being in the hospital and seeing so many people in pain really got me thinking.  We are so, so, so lucky.  We’re so lucky to have such a healthy baby, and we’re so lucky to have access to such amazing health care.  Even if Aubrey did have pyloric stenosis, it could be corrected with a 1 hr minimally invasive procedure, but a century ago it would have killed her.  I just can’t imagine the parents with babies in those hospitals who are seriously sick.  All babies are so helpless and innocent, it just breaks my heart.  I know this isn’t the last time that Aubrey will be sick, or the last time that she’ll cry those sad tears, but I don’t think it’ll get any easier on her mom and dad to watch as she gets older.  We just keep on loving her more and more every day.

About two weeks ago Aubrey caught a cold from me, and it was even harder watching her fight that bug as it was her very first “illness” in her life.  Now she seems to have caught something from Kelly who is also fighting a really mean cold, so it must have been a different bug since theoretically she should have some immunity against the strain I gave her that she just recovered from.

I got thinking about all this as I started to get sleepy around 6am, trying to calm my baby back to sleep.  Aubrey is such a good baby.  She hardly fusses at all, even when she’s not comfortable, having trouble breathing or throwing up from an upset tummy.  It’s like in her infancy she is already wise enough to know that she needs to go through these trials and fight the viruses and bacteria that are in her environment so that her body and immune system can get stronger as she grows.  She is a completely different baby than she was even just a few weeks ago, it’s incredible to watch her change and develop.

I think in many ways, it’s like God is holding us in his arms, rocking us back and forth and comforting us, even when we don’t realize it.  And in the grand scheme of things, I believe we are emotionally and spiritually still in our infancy, compared to the incredible potential we have as spiritual beings created in God’s image.  He knows when we are struggling, with the same intense awareness that a new parent has as they watch their little infant fighting a cold, hoping and praying that they will soon feel better.  God recognizes that we humans live in a world where we will each inevitably encounter our own viruses and demons, and we’ll have to go through pain and struggles in order to grow and build strength of character, and strength of spirit.  God knows all this, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t there with us when we are sick, tired, hurting or broken.

I believe Aubrey will feel better soon, and I know that being surrounded with love by her mom and dad will make a huge difference in enabling her body to heal and grow stronger.  It’s the same for all of us.  The love that God surrounds us with helps us to heal and grow, and it usually comes to us through the friends, family and strangers in our lives.  It’s important to remember then, that by treating others with love, we become an extension of God’s love.

Jackie needed to go see another friend that afternoon, Terri Brown-Gust, who teaches Grade 1 at the Bashaw School.  So I went over with her and visited with the 6 year olds while they did their business (I think Hudson was pretty excited and surprised to see me walk into his classroom) and then while we were there anyway, Jackie suggested we go talk to the woman at the school office to see if the school had any lights we could borrow.  My first reaction was to think to myself “why on Earth would the school lend us lights”.  But you can’t hit the ball if you don’t swing, so we went down the hall to ask.

Now, since Jackie knows every single person in Bashaw I wasn’t surprised that she and the receptionist struck up a conversation right away.  But I was pretty impressed when she just handed Jackie a set of keys and said “if we do have some lights, they’d be in the storage room downstairs behind the workout room.  Go take a look and help yourself if you find something helpful.”

As trivial as this all seems, and even though we didn’t in fact find any lights at all (we ended up using a floor lamp from Jackie’s house with the shade removed) I was still very impacted by the experience.  Here’s what I took away from the encounter:

1) It’s always worth asking.

2) People are more important than things, events or even causes.  People give their time, their money, their ear and their best effort to the people who need it.  Not to the project or the event or even the greater cause, but to the people.

3) In this small community, we’re all on the same team.  It doesn’t matter what you’re trying to do, who it’s for or why you’re doing it.  Pretty much everyone you meet is just happy to help if they can, no questions asked.  And that is pretty amazing.

I think canning and preserving food is quickly becoming a lost art in our society today where we are so used to having anything we want to eat at any time of year.  Fruits are imported from the other side of the world in the middle of winter, and nobody even knows where the carrots or potatoes in their stew came from anymore.  The story of how this all happened is a long one that I’ll leave for another post, but needless to say, it’s a topic that I’m rather passionate about.  So yes, canning my own food has the major appeal of reducing my footprint on the environment by preserving local produce for the winter months, but I also just love cooking and learning new things in the kitchen.  For health reasons, I also like the idea of eating food that hasn’t been sprayed with a lot of chemicals and filled with preservatives.  In fact, we plan to buy a small deep freeze to store some green beans, carrots and other veggies from the farmers market for the winter.

Last week our friends John-Ross and Laurissa came over and we made a huge batch of green tomato salsa with roma and beefsteak tomatoes from Jackie and Grant’s garden.  We also harvested all the carrots from our back yard and washed them up to make dill pickled carrots.  They were pathetically small, but perfect for pickling.  It took a long time to cut up all the carrots and the tomatoes, peppers, onions and garlic.  Jars had to be sterilized and then filled and processed in the canner.  But it didn’t feel like work.  Partly because we were sipping wine, but mostly because we were lost in great conversation the entire time.

I had so much fun in fact, that I decided to do another whole batch of salsa last night by myself.  It isn’t quite the same experience canning alone (and without wine), and I didn’t get to bed until 1:30 a.m. but I have 12 jars of salsa to show for it at least.  And this time I didn’t make the mistake of dumping in several table spoons of cayenne pepper before taste testing it, so I think it can safely be labeled ‘mild’.  I think the lesson for me was that yes, we CAN reclaim the lost arts of the kitchen, but it’s always better to have some friends to share in the work, and of course to share the salsa and carrots with, too.

For her birthday this year Kelly and I weren’t going to try to do anything big or go anywhere far away.  With a small baby at home it was pretty intimidating to try to plan much of anything.  But we’d both been yearning to get away from home to do something, so I planned a little excursion to Pigeon Lake on the Saturday, the day before Kelly’s birthday.

I have been wanting to play the tourist in my home province ever since the summer I spent flying across Canada.  I explored every other province and found all kinds of great places I’d never known anything about, but when it came to Alberta I pretty much flew to Ponoka to see my family and then got back in the air and headed to the next province.  I’m starting to see how truly beautiful and unique rural Alberta is, and that there really are a lot of cool places that are within a short drive of Bashaw, well worth exploring.

The village at Pigeon Lake consists of basically  just a few shops, an ice cream and coffee parlour, the hotel, a restaurant and the Eco-Cafe.  I booked Kelly in for a 1-hr hot stone relaxation massage at the Inn, but before that we had lunch at the restaurant and did a little shopping.  We picked up a really cute clock for Aubrey’s room, and then went next door and had a latte and visited while a small shower passed over.  While Kelly was in for her massage I took Aubrey in her stroller down to the lake, which turned out to be a rather bumpy ride for her on a gravel road, ending at a residential part of the shoreline where there wasn’t much to see but a small boat launch.  It was also really, really windy so I quickly turned her around and headed back to the Inn.  Along the way we had to stop in a sheltered part of the woods for me to change Aubrey’s diaper, but even despite the cool wind and the rocky path I think Aubrey enjoyed the walk almost as much as her dad.

For supper we ate at the Eco-Cafe which serves a lot of local ingredients and has a really fantastic atmosphere.  Kelly has met the owner before and says he’s a great guy.  I think we’ll definitely be going back to try some more items from their exotic and very reasonably priced menu.

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to get to know my home province, but now that I’m planting roots in this great rural community I know that we’ll have lots more weekend trips to look forward to as we keep exploring all the hidden treasures in our own back yard.

She came out perfect!  Once the doctor had rubbed her back to get a big cry out of her and we could tell she was breathing, I came over and cut the cord.  That was pretty intense.  Seeing this tiny little body in the doctors hands, still attached to my wife with this strange looking cord that supplied her with everything she needed in the womb, it was almost impossible to believe this was a real human being.  When they took her over to the warming table to check her over, Aubrey didn’t make a peep.  She just laid there calmly blinking and taking it all in, patiently waiting for this strange new world to make some sense.

Definitely the biggest revelation I experienced in that first few hours of being a father, was the fact that hey, I know how to be a father.  Where did that come from?  I knew Kelly would be a very natural mother, it’s just part of her DNA and she’s had a lot of experience helping take care of her nephews and nieces and even her cousins when they were younger.  And I knew that I loved babies and children, but I didn’t know how well I’d fare at interpreting all the signs and anticipating the needs of a brand new infant.  I just couldn’t believe how perfect Aubrey was, watching Kelly hold her for the first time while she lay there trying to recover from the trauma her body had just gone through.  And then she handed Aubrey to me.  The bond of love I felt with this tiny little baby was so strong and so instant.  Yes, I think that other than the complete disaster I had changing her first diaper, my daddy instincts were pretty strong.

5 things I learned by having a baby girl:

1. Laundry now has 3 categories.  Instead of just whites and darks, it’s whites, darks and PINK!
2. I can get anything on my hands and I won’t die.
3. A baby’s bum truly is the softest thing on earth.
4. There is a strange urge to call your daughter by the name of  foods such as peanut, pumpkin and sweet pea, yet other very similar foods like walnut, zucchini or carrot just don’t have the same appeal.
5. Even when a baby is crying or pooping, it’s all adorable when it’s your own little girl.

And then, after the rain finally let up, came the plague of the mosquito!  So for that tiny stretch of warm weather that we did get, you had to take a deet shower before venturing outdoors or you’d be devoured in minutes.  I guess the nice thing about August being so cold was that it helped to kill some of the mosquitos, but now it’s early Sept, the lawn is already covered in leaves, I have to wear a jacket almost every day, and it all leaves me wondering; did we have summer?  Or did I blink and miss it?

Perhaps another factor in all this is the fact that Kelly and I didn’t really take any summer holidays this year.  Normally we spend some time on Manitoulin Island with my family, and last summer as well as the summer before that also involved Kelly and I traveling to Halifax and back, moving everything there, and then moving everything right back.  So the fact that we didn’t really travel anywhere this summer was quite different, but it was for a very, very good reason.

If you’re thinking that a wet spring, a bug invested July, a cold August and a total flop of a garden was enough to make this summer a disappointment for me, you’re wrong.  It was the best summer of my life.  Because on July 22nd at 12:21pm I became a father.  The single most transforming experience of my life, the day I helped Kelly bring Aubrey Violet Wilson into the world completely changed who I am and what my life is about.  But because there are SO many thoughts I want to share, I think I’d better save my revelations on becoming a new parent for another post, tomorrow.

http://bensgallery.smugmug.com/Nature/Spring-at-Pelican-Point

Enjoy!