What being a parent means to me.

I had my first child when I was 18 years old, 3 months and 1 day before my 19th birthday. I had no doubt at the time that it was a lifetime commitment and was not one that I took on without realizing the all encompassing role that I would have for the rest of my life. I have now been a mother for well over half my life. I am also now a grandmother.

First and foremost, as a Mother, I am protector, caregiver, confidante, provider, guardian, teacher, prophet, leader, friend, guide, champion, motivator, messenger, nurturer, safety-net, the stability in my children's lives, a constant.

I am going to breakdown each one of those words to describe what it means to me.

Protector - If my child is in a place where he or she could be harmed physically, spiritually or emotionally, it is my job to intervene. An example is (physically) that when a child does not have his papers submitted for his green card, it was my job to tell him to get his ass in gear and get it done. Spiritually - when someone is directing angry energy towards my child, I intervene both with talking and protective energy to keep her safe. Emotionally - when my son was being teased for being gay in elementary school, I intervened and made it stop.

Caregiver - to make sure that they are taken care of - fed, clothed, housed. meeting their basic needs.

Confidante - being there to hear them when they have something that they are having a hard time with. Listening to them and sharing what wisdom I have to help them through the struggle they are having.

Provider - to be able to provide a safe refuge for them to come home to. Have good food, a safe home and all of the schooling that I can possibly afford to give them, everything they need. This includes extra curricular activities like dance, music lessons, film programs, art, sports etc.

Guardian - It is my job to protect them where they need it. When one of my children asked me why I was still making decisions for him when he was 15, I told him it was because it was still my responsibility to override a decision he made if I deemed it to be unsafe for him. That role remains intact until the child turns 19.

Teacher - to provide them with enough knowledge and skills to be able to be all of this to themselves and to their own children. This is ongoing and is a responsibility that I believe I have until the day I die. As they get older, they are also able to teach me. This goes from one way to reciprocal with their growth and age.

Prophet - when children are young, in my mind a parent is their to help them believe that they can be and do anything. Very few parents are able to help children realize their dreams and children have dreams that change. It is my job to show them the brightness of their lives to come. This is, in my mind, especially important as a parent can squash a child's dreams more effectively than anyone else. This is not only done by telling kids that they cannot do something, but also by putting to much pressure on a child or by not listening to what the child wants. As parents, we are the almighty and as children grow they question the almighty to learn their own power.

Leader - It is my job to lead them in the right direction with intuition, discernment and knowledge as my guide.

Friend - This one is important. Not every child has a parent as a best friend, however, it is important to be a friend to them and teach them what it is to be a friend. My mother taught me this and I hope that I have successfully taught my children. Exploring and defining what friendship means to them can only happen if they have had a friend and their first friend will be there parent(s).

Guide - Like the light in the dark. When a child is feeling at their worst, the parent guides them through whatever issue they are going through, giving them tools to manage. This is also linked to Teacher and we use that role to teach them how to be their own guide.

Champion - to believe in them, to egg them on to be the best they can be, to constantly tell them how good they are at whatever they do and to guide them to be even better.

Motivator - to kick their asses when they think they can't go on. To help them get tools to get past each struggle they have. Teach them that success is a good thing and that they not only deserve it, but should always strive towards it. Teach them that they are the only ones to hold themselves back and a parent's job is to not allow them to do that.

Messenger - To be able to give them the messages they need to hear in spiritual matters, guiding them to find and nurture their own spirituality. Allowing the messages to come to them and showing them where they might find them when they cannot find them on their own. Allowing them the time and space to shun spirituality and continue giving them the message that they are whole and complete the way they are.

Nurturer - This is more ethereal than anything else and may be hard for me to describe. To water them as necessary, feed them when they are hungry and to let them have quiet time when they need it, allowing them the chance to grow, just like flowers in a garden. To nurture is not to hover over and watch their every move, but to allow them the space and time to grow giving them all the tools they need to do that and allowing them to do it on their own as and when they should, while always being in the background watching to see if a storm is coming and taking what you need to protect them at that moment.

Safety-net - being there to catch them when they fall.

The stability in my children's lives/a constant - These two are essentially the same thing and it has to do with unconditional love. Unconditional love is not about unconditional acceptance. I will not accept boundaries being crossed, but I can still love the person. It means that no matter what they will always be close family. Part of that inner circle that you expect to spend the rest of your life with in one way or another. When their world is falling apart and they feel that they have nowhere to turn and nothing to stand on you are there, loving them. You have made a commitment to continue to parent them which encompasses all of the above until the day you (or they) die.

That is what being a parent means to me.

Pay it forward!

There is this thing on facebook about paying it forward. In the year 2011, I posted it on my facebook page and only one person responded. She did not get something handmade. We still haven't managed to get together for coffee.

I have decided to make a slight modification to my pay it forward program.

As many of you may have figured out from my previous writing, I love to knit Christmas stockings. They are a tradition in my family and it brings me great pleasure to be able to knit a personalized stocking for someone. What I have realized is that there are a few crucial parts for me. I do not feel right knitting a stocking with no name. There must be a name knitted into it. I want each stocking to be a different design and to reflect something about the person who will get it.

I know it is early, still being January, however, I have always started my Christmas preparations in January, except for the food. For that info, you will have to wait until later in the year.

So here is my "pay it forward" proposal. If there is someone special in your life whom you think would love a handknit stocking, please let me know. I will knit a stocking for them to have for next Christmas, in colours meant for them, with their name and a design that would be right for them. I would be happy to talk about it. In exchange, if there is something that you have or do that would be good for me, please offer what you can. It takes me about 2 weeks to knit a stocking when I am taking my time. It is probably more than 12 hours of work. Each stocking I have knit has been unique in many different ways. My favourite yarn store is Baad Anna's on Hastings Street. They have fabulous yarns for stockings. I have all the needles I need and all I need now is someone to knit the stocking for.

First Snow Spa Day!

I woke up this morning with a wicked headache. For those of you who don't know, I have had migraines through much of my life and have controlled them through the foods that I eat and don't eat. That is one of the reasons why I stopped eating wheat.

So in my dazed state of mind, Christine told me that it was all white outside and I didn't quite understand. After a couple of tylenol and a nice dark cup of coffee, I was able to see the snow on the ground. It looked pretty and I was starting to feel better but knew I needed to take care of myself today.

The headache started yesterday and hung on tight. I also got a phone call from my daughter in law who was on her way up to Canada with my son and granddaughter to visit. Bad news, they had some stuff stolen from their car including my son's green card. A green card not only allows him to work in the U.S. but also allows him to re-enter when he comes to Canada to visit. It was Friday morning and there were many things they needed to do, starting with contacting bank and credit cards to shut down all cards that were there and also the police to file a report. Then on to the Green Card. They have electronic tracking devices in them now, however, there is also a shield and it needs to be taken out of it's little case to have the device work. It takes three months to replace and even though there is the possibility that they could get a government letter stating that he has one and that he is allowed to re-enter the U.S., this Monday is Martin Luther King Day and the government offices are closed until Tuesday, which means coming up Tuesday or Wednesday and they are supposed to leave Friday morning. My headache had a little bit of heartache to go with it. I love spending time with my granddaughter, son and daughter in law. The last time I saw them was March 2011.

Definitely a good day to take care of myself. Christine told me to take a bath and I have this lovely "seaweed bath" from Calixica Spa located on Granville Island. So after making a couple of loaves of French bread, smudging and cleaning the house including our guest room. Chatting on the phone with my son and family, it was time to run a nice hot bath, I used the facial mask that I also got from Calixica, , and grabbed a big glass of water and got into the steaming hot seaweed bath in our new spa bathroom. I love to go to the Spa, I enjoy having a manicure/pedicure with my daughter Boedicea. For someone who has worked in the food industry, this became a luxury as it is for many others, a luxury of being able to just be still for a moment.

For me today, the first snow day of 2012 has helped me to feel renewed energy, cleansing of my heart, body and soul. Now at the end of the day, I am sitting on the couch relaxing in front of the fire, candles lit throughout the house waiting for my pizza to be ready and spend the rest of the night with the love of my life Christine.

Full Moon Dinner!

I love food!! There is nothing quite like a delicious dinner after a day of hard work and a long bus ride across town.

That's right, a bus ride! With no Spelt mobile I am now taking the bus home from my parents after having their car on the weekend. In a lot of ways my life has become very scheduled since January 1st. All my time is set out on the schedule and it is almost like when we had the bakery and every day was accounted for.

Maybe it's a little odd to feel that I am scheduled only 9 days into the New Year, but that is how I feel and I kinda like it. I like having a schedule and knowing what my routine is and at the same time I like to shake things up and have some excitement.

One of the things that we have done is to write a weekly menu plan. Now that is ORGANIZED!!!! And completely delicious!!! Tonight, after a day taking care of administration work for my parents, an appointment with a client, some shopping and a bus ride across town, I came home to find the love of my life making a beautiful chicken fried rice with the rice I made this morning and the leftover from the roast chicken that we had last night. But that was NOT dinner, that's for tomorrow's lunch.

Dinner was one of my favourite meals and when I first went wheat free I missed it terribly. Tonight's dinner was a beautiful club house sandwich made with three pieces of my home made white Spelt bread. I like mine to have two pieces of toast buttered with tomato slices and nitrate free bacon and fresh cracked pepper. Then the middle slice is covered in mayonnaise for the next part of the sandwich with either turkey or chicken and lettuce and the third slice tops it all off. The hard part is trying to eat it.

It was well worth the difficulties of holding it together and I feel like I had the best dinner ever!

I have always found that a routine allows me to be in the present and being present and aware of what I am doing makes the food that I am lucky enough to have that much more enjoyable. So, the next time you sit down to a Club House Sandwich I hope that it brings you as much pleasure as it did for me today, the full moon of January 2012.

Enjoy!!!

All the Decorations are down!

The holidays are over, The New Year has begun and I am feeling pretty good about the holidays this year. I feel like I accomplished all the things that I wanted to do and have an even better plan for next year.

This year, on the top of my list was knitting 3 Christmas stockings. I have been knitting since I was 8 years old and I love knitting stockings. My children and I all have stockings that my mother knitted and Christine has a stocking that I knitted for her the first year we were together. She keeps asking me for the other one. She was not aware when she met me that I loved Christmas and that she would not only have a big Family Christmas, but also a Christmas stocking. We met in February and didn't talk about Christmas when we first met. When we did get closer to Christmas and I asked her what colour stocking she wanted and what design, she said red, brown and green stripes. This was the stocking I made her.



Last year I made one for my granddaughter Lilja for her first Christmas. I remember madly knitting every evening after baking over a hundred loaves of bread, rolling out pastry for fifty pies and making hundreds of cookies amongst other things just to get it into the mail in time for her to get it for Christmas morning.




The first one I made this year was for Calvin, his was Celtic Spiral work knitted in red and white with green trim, I started and finished it in early December. I always use the same pattern that my Mom bought from Mary Maxim some time in the eighties, but I change the needle size, the yarn and the design every single time. The one thing I always do is the same number of stitches and I use the graph for the letters for the names. I love that pattern.







The second one I made this year was for my daughter-in-law Britta. I had my son Erik's stocking and Lilja already had hers and now it was time for Britta to have one made by me. I chose natural fibres, bamboo, silk and Merino wool in blue and white with an edging of handmade lace that I bought in Barkerville in the early 90's. She loves natural fibres and is quite talented with fabric arts as well. This stocking had to be knitted by December 15th in order to have my daughter Boedicea take it to the States with her and give it to Britta. I started it December 8th or 9th and finished sewing it together and adding the lace the evening of December 14th. Just enough time to take a photo and give it to my Boedicea to pack on December 15th.


The final stocking that I knitted was for my daughter-in-law to be, Mandy. I always want to do something special for each person that I knit a stocking for. I want it to represent them and have something on it meaningful to them. I have to say it is a lot easier to do that with adults than children. When my son Kristoffer and Mandy got engaged in early December, we saw the ring and I found it very interesting. a green stone on a silver ring with a tree. I then went and looked at her facebook page and kept seeing pictures of trees. After a big long search for a tree pattern that would fit in 28 to 34 stitches, I found the tree of Gondor pattern and I knit Mandy's stocking in yarn that my mum had in her stash and some from my own, in a nice soft green with a brown tree and the name, heel and toe all in a nice deep red. I finsihed her stocking on December 22nd and delivered it to my son on December 23rd while out doing the last of our food shopping and some gift shopping for my parents.

That was it: December 23rd, all stockings done, all food bought, all decorations up and all gifts ready to go. I felt so good to have been able to get everything done so that I could just spend the 24th with the woman I love, cooking fabulous food for a small group of friends and family. Then Christmas dinner at my moms' the next day and it was an incredible Christmas. I was surrounded by people I love and we all had good food.

Now the decorations are down, the food is all gone and the stockings are put away for another year. Part of me is a bit sad and wondering who will I kit a stocking for next year? Maybe Christine will finally get that second one she has been asking for.

The Spelt Mobile

For the first time in my adult life I am carless. The Spelt Mobile has finally given up and been taken away. I have been driving a Chevy Astrovan since 1994 and the green Spelt Mobile was the second. The first one was blue. I was always amused at the fact that the first van was blue and that was when the colours of the bakery were green and white. The second van was green and then we changed the logo to blue, white and black.

I bought the original chevy astrovan in 1994, when I was expecting my third child and needed a larger vehicle with more seats. I remember driving it for the first time and I had always driven small cars before that. It seemed like all the other cars were so tiny when I was up in the BIG VAN. I quickly got used to it and whenever I drove a small car, I felt like I was way too close to the ground.

That first van came in very handy when I opened the bakery in 1998, being perfect for carrying trays of bread. I was thrilled to have such a versatile vehicle. Gas prices were well under $1.00/litre back then. I remember gas prices being as low as 49.9¢ per litre and everyone was freaking out when it went up to 79.9¢ per litre. I don't remember what year that was though.

After ten years of driving the first Chevy Astro van, it was time to move on. I started my search for the next Spelt Mobile and had a few criteria that must be met. I needed to be able to transport my children wherever we wanted to go. I also needed to be able to put two bread trays next to each other in the back of the van for doing deliveries.

On my search, I headed straight to Richmond Auto Mall and started looking at all the mini-vans available. I would go to a car dealer and say, "Can you please open the back of this van?" and I would take my two bread trays and try and put them in. It quickly became obvious that the trays would not fit in any of the vehicles that I wanted. I would have to get another Chevy Astrovan to meet my needs. And so the second Spelt Mobile was bought. A one year old Chevy Astrovan.

I have so many stories of the Spelt Mobile:

Driving the Coquihalla in white out snow. I couldn't see more than a few feet in front of the van and my daughter was in the seat next to me chanting, "Oh Goddesses and powers that be, please take this snow away from me." It took me 8 hours to drive from Kamloops to Hope. Then we hit a rainstorm through Abbotsford. That was a long day.

In 2008 when Christine and I went to France, a friend borrowed the Spelt Mobile and we told her before we left to not worry about people waving at her or honking their horn, etc. They were just Spelties. When we got home, some of our customers asked us who had been driving the Spelt Mobile. We laughed that people noticed and took it so seriously.

I have never had a hard time finding my car in the parking lot. The Spelt Mobile is big and has the bright How's that Spelt logo on it, I could even find it in the Metrotown Parking lot. That has to be the hardest parking lot to find a car in.

Many people have driven the spelt mobile over the years. Many road trips have been taken. Over the last several months, the Spelt Mobile has been unhappy. It is not driven as much as it was when I first got it. We stopped doing deliveries in 2008 and then when we shut down the Bakery in 2010, we barely drove it at all. After fixing it a couple of times over the last two months, it became clear that the repairs needed to keep it going were not worth the ongoing cost of running a vehicle like the Spelt Mobile. We took it to the garage (Irving Tire on Clark and 2nd) on December 22nd and they gave us a loaner car to use during the holidays. They said that they probably wouldn't be able to fix the car until the 27th due to the holidays and days off. We thought it was the fuel pump.

After Christmas on December 27th, I got the call that the damage to the Spelt Mobile was more extensive than we could have imagined. The cost of the repairs was quite high and there was no guarantee that it would fix the problem or how long until another problem would arise. After getting the information from the garage, Christine and I talked about our options and we decided to was time to let the Spelt Mobile go.

I have been bringing the Spelt Mobile to these guys for many years and have always been happy with the service from them, however, this time they went above and beyond. When I told Tom that we were not going to keep the van and we would find someone to pick it up and take it away, I requested to use the loaner to empty our personal contents from the van and take them home. Then we would come back with their loaner car. Tom told me that we could keep the car until the next morning if we needed to run some errands or get stuff done.

I told Tom and Richard from Irving Tire that I really appreciated them and everything that they had done for us and when I do have another vehicle, I will be back. Whenever I had taken the van to them, they were always clear about what needed to be done and how much it would cost. On a tight budget, this was very helpful. I had been to other garages in the past, but I was always treated well by them.

When we went into the garage to get our personal effects from the Spelt Mobile, we dropped off a bag of shortbread cookies and said Thank you. Tom said that he was glad that we made the decision we did, that he thought it wasn't worth fixing anymore. I told him that I had always felt like he was looking after my interests when it came to taking care of my car. He told me that he just wanted to treat me as if I was his sister. I smiled.

I am sad about losing the Spelt Mobile, one of the last vestiges of The Spelt Bakery and at the same time, it was time to move on. The Spelt Mobile may be gone and you will never see me driving it down the streets of Vancouver again, but the memories will always be there and as I have always done, a little bit of Spelt baking is just the right thing for me to give as a Thank you.

Thank you Tom and Richard at Irving Tire for caring for the Spelt Mobile and caring about your customers as family. Thank you Spelties for being part of our "family" . Thank you Spelt Mobile for all the good times and memories. My life would not have been the same without you.