Where's winter?

The calendar and the thermometer have been out of sync for the last week. We've been enjoying remarkably mild weather, as in several degrees above freezing, for most of the month. It's been gray and rainy a lot, but I'd rather deal with that than snow. You don't have to shovel rain. On the downside, the Canal is nowhere near being ready for skating. In fact, large sections of it are completely ice-free. Unless things turn around quickly, it's shaping up to be a very short skating season.

Of course, one of the two really cold days we've had this month was last Thursday, when the official illumination ceremony on Parliament Hill took place. Hoping to break free of our usual stay-inside-itis, we decided to venture over and take in the event. What a boondoggle. First, I am not overly familiar with downtown Ottawa, and I drew more than one middle finger as I puttered around, clueless, looking for parking during rush hour. That task accomplished, we walked up to the Hill, and soon confronted the reality that it was cold. Really, really cold. Like, -12 C/10 F. Much too cold to stand around in an open area, waiting for Christmas lights to be turned on. Man, it was a trial. Officials from various organizations gave endless speeches. In Both Official Languages. All of it was rendered unintelligible by the tinny P.A. system. The Prime Minister gave a speech. I don't think I've ever heard a Canadian prime minister give a speech live. It would have been more meaningful if we had been able to actually hear what he was saying. We listened to garbled messages from all 10 premiers and 3 territorial leaders. More French. Blah blah blah. We waited for the lights. Waited and waited. It was pretty dark where we were standing, and Henry spent the whole time saying, "Can we go home?", and "I'm scared." Finally, the countdown. And then. . . not much. A snowflake pattern was projected onto Parliament. Maybe some trees or something were lit up as well--it was hard to tell from where we were standing. A choir started singing over the lousy P.A., and that was that. We hauled our frozen behinds back to the car and cranked the heat.

So the event was a bust. But hey, we tried. We redeemed the evening by going out to the local burger joint, where Henry proceeded to hoover two orders of mac and cheese, plus a chocolate milkshake. And on that note, I want to give my kid some credit. I complain a lot about the difficult aspects of his personality (the bad sleeping, the picky eating, the stubborn refusal to ride in strollers), but I'm happy to report that he's remarkably well behaved in public. The lighting ceremony was a pretty miserable way to spend an hour, but his complaints were quiet and totally legitimate. And it's really great that we can take him out to eat without having to worry that he'll throw a tantrum and force us to leave. As long as he's got some room to roam (and by this I don't mean, "as long as he can be a total menace by running through the dining room uninhibited") and a toy or two, he's almost always happy to hang out and take in the scene while we eat. And that goes for most other activities, too. So there you go--it's not all a struggle with him. Most of the time we have a lot of fun together. But I doubt we'll make it to the illumination ceremony next year.