Life is not merely being alive, but being well.

I am not one of those people with a ridiculously strong belief system. I chalk this up to my not knowing 110% who I am at this point in my life. Unlike a lot of people my age, I don’t prescribe to a particular political party or religion. I am kind of ‘wishy washy’ in that way, I suppose.

There is, however, one thing that I feel very strongly about and it wasn’t until I had a daughter that this particular belief took hold. What is this belief, you ask? Simply put, it’s instilling confidence and self-esteem in your children, especially young girls. I am disgusted when I see how many elementary school girls are obsessed with their weight.

I heard about a new book called “Maggie Goes on a Diet” which is set to be published in October (actually, on my daughter’s birthday). This book is aimed at children ages 6+ and is about the main character Maggie, going on a diet and losing weight.

Hearing about this book frustrated me beyond belief. Six-year-olds shouldn’t even know the word ‘diet,’ in my opinion. Upon reading the summary of the book, I learned that it’s about Maggie who uses diet and exercise to lose excess weight. Maybe this book would be accepted more openly if it had been marketed a different way. I won’t argue that it’s important for children to learn about healthy eating and physical activity but I don’t think it should be shoved down their throats with an illustrated book aimed at Grade 1 girls! Just take a look at the cover of the book:



Does this image remind anyone of eating disorder images that pop up all over the internet:



*shudders* I would never in a million years purchase a book like this for my daughter. She is going to learn about healthy eating through my cooking and will be physically active because I will be physically active with her and will encourage her to be physically active.

Another thing that frustrates me about the state of the younger generation’s self-esteem issue is that their negative self-image can be prevented through proper parenting techniques by simply paying attention to the things you do/say around your children. Going on a fad diet (i.e., cabbage soup diet) isn’t setting a good example for your children. You might think they’re too young to notice your eating habits but they aren’t. If you aren’t following a healthy lifestyle (that is, eating healthy foods and getting proper exercise), you aren’t setting the right example for your kids. How can you expect your children not to have self-esteem issues when you’re constantly trying different diets and bad-talking yourself and your weight?

Since my daughter has started talking, I’ve tried to eliminate a lot of the self-hate talk that I do oh-so-often! She might only be three but you can bet she understands what I’m saying if I make fun of my weight or say negative things like “I’m fat!” If she grows up in a household hearing things like that or watching me obsess over food, you can bet she will be doing the same thing when she’s old enough to understand what “fat” means. I don’t say these words around her and get really annoyed when people poke her belly and call her ‘chubby.’ Not a good thing to be saying to a child.

Here’s a scary statistic I pulled off the internet:

"Nine - age at which at least half of all girls report having been on a diet.
Eighty percent of eighth grade girls say they are on diets."

You can bet when I was in Grade 8, I was worried about my weight. And at 9, I was leaving notes for myself in candy dishes saying “Chantelle, don’t eat this!” In fact, I can remember back to one of the first times I was really concerned about my weight. It was Grade 3 and during an indoor recess someone called me a “cow.” I still haven’t forgotten that. I remember obsessively weighing myself throughout elementary school and even kindergarten. I was 55 lbs in Kindergarten (if I’m remembering correctly) and 88 lbs in Grade 4 or 5. Funny how these sorta things stick with someone.

I don’t want Melina to grow up with the terrible self-esteem I have. I am doing everything in my power to instil healthy habits in my daughter. She watches me eat and exercise and she already is emulating my healthy (and sometimes unhealthy) habits. They’re like sponges.

You can bet when I was in Grade 8, I was worried about my weight. In fact, I can remember back to one of the first times I was really concerned about my weight. It was Grade 3 and during an indoor recess someone called me a “cow.” I still haven’t forgotten that. I remember obsessively weighing myself throughout elementary school and even kindergarten. I was 55 lbs in Kindergarten (if I’m remembering correctly) and 88 lbs in Grade 4 or 5. Funny how these sorta things stick with someone.

I don’t want Melina to grow up with the terrible self-esteem I have. I am doing everything in my power to instill healthy habits in my daughter. She watches me exercise and eats healthy because I cook healthy. How can you expect your children to have a healthy lifestyle if all you cook them is chicken fingers and French fries? Melina’s favourite food is chicken breast (cooked any and all ways) because we cook chicken so often. I read a fact in a magazine today that by age 3 children have started to make up their minds about what foods they like and dislike! Scary, hey? I remember being a kid and eating tons of macaroni and cheese and hot dogs (foods I hate now, by the way). But we are trying to incorporate healthy, balanced meals in Melina’s life so that is how she will be accustomed to eating by the time she’s old enough to start remembering her childhood. We aren’t perfect. There are days we go out for ice cream and hit up a drive-thru, but like I said in a previous entry, we eat healthy 80% of the time and ‘naughty’ 20% of the time.

What’s something you feel strongly about?

We do not remember days; we remember moments.

Side note: This entry is ALL over the place. But I feel in the spirit of reminiscing, I am going to leave it unedited.

It is weird for me to go to the town I was born in. I only lived there for the first four years of my life but most of my favourite childhood memories are from time spent visiting in that little town of 2,100 people.

My grandparents, many of my aunts and uncles on my mom’s side of the family and most of my cousins lived in ‘Hazy’ (as I’ll call it) and, as I child, we went to visit there quite often. The cousins always had so much fun raising hell in our grandparent’s basement, where our parents often dropped us off to do what we wished while the adults socialized upstairs.

It’s hard for me to believe that the days of hanging out with my cousins in that basement are long gone even though it’s been years since I have been in the basement with my cousins. Whenever I go to my Grandma’s now, I am reminded of all of the amazing times I had in Hazy during every summer of my childhood, every family get together, every Christmas.

Things are different at my Grandma’s now and it makes me sad to be there. Don’t get me wrong, I love visiting my Grandma and other relatives in Hazy but it breaks my heart being at her house. The obvious reason is that my Grandpa is no longer there anymore. It’s interesting though, because even though he’s not there I can still feel him in the house. I can still picture his spot at the kitchen table and his spot on the couch that’s no longer there.

While he was in the hospital last summer, there were little things lying around the house that showed Grandpa had been there recently – namely, his harmonica and his Toronto Maple Leaf slippers. I remember when we were visiting him while he was in the hospital, Melina was walking around the house with his slippers on and I had to make her take them off. Just out of respect, I guess.

I always enter my Grandma’s house with a heavy heart now, knowing Grandpa isn’t there to make silly jokes and whistle all day. I remember once when I was much younger, Grandpa made a joke about “hor'deurves”, calling them “horse overs.” Haha. I miss his stories at the supper table and his yummy garden veggies.

I know he’s still around and can feel his presence at the house sometimes. It’s hard to accept, though, that things will never be the same again. Hazy is a different little town now without my Grandpa as a physical part of it. Every time I have visited my Grandma in this past year, more and more changes are being made to her house. They’re good changes, like making small updates to the house. But it feels weird seeing things change in a house that went without change for so many years. I still miss the dark brown carpet in their upstairs living room that they had for so many years. It was thick carpet and attracted cat hair like crazy so it was a pain in the butt to keep clean but, dammit, that rug was a huge help in making epic, huge card castles!

I really don’t know where I was heading with this blog entry. I wanted to make note of the things that I miss about my hometown but it just goes hand-in-hand with my Grandpa’s passing.

I want Melina to be able to make memories at my Grandma’s house, the way that I made memories there growing up. Every time we go to visit, we pass a building or a landmark in the town that reminds me of something I experienced as a child – my first time tasting wine at a cousins wedding in the hall by my Grandma’s house (which led to my first alcohol-induced headache), hanging out at the local bank because it was the ‘cool’ place to be (or so I thought at the time), going to classes at the library during the summer, taking library books home without signing them out because my sister told me that there was a specific rack of books you could just take for free ( I still don’t know if there’s any truth to this), hanging out at the vintage-feeling ice cream shop my relatives owned, going into the bar underage to do a shot at the town’s centennial celebration (you’re not reading this, are you, Mom?) and the list goes on.

But the memories made around the city are nothing compared to the memories made with my family at my grandparents house – hanging out in the basement with Candace and having a ‘who can hold their arm up in the air the longest’ contest because we saw it on an episode of Survivor (I think we held it up for over an hour), looking through the scary storage area under the basement stairs and scaring each other down there because it was legit scary sometimes, traumatizing my slightly younger cousins with stories of Michael Smith (sorry Delaney) and other scary stories (sorry Brandi), throwing rocks at cars that pass by (okay, that was once and I was really young and a man got out of his car and yelled at us and that never happened again), being summer friends with the kids who lived next door, playing in the ball diamonds behind Grandma’s house, watching ball at the ball diamonds, having the whole family manage a huge sleepover in my grandparents house during every family get together (especially Christmas! That house is packed!), going to the outdoor swimming pool by the house, cabbage rolls and cucumber salad and other yummies that only Grandma’s can make, getting ran over by a boy on a bicycle in the driveway of my grandparents house (I swear this happened but no one has confirmed or denied it for me. It may have been a dream. But I distinctly remember my white blouse having tire marks across it haha), visiting with the family on the patio, listening to Grandpa fill the house with his harmonica playing, watching The Price is Right with Grandpa and the hockey games with Grandma (who cheers louder than anyone I’ve ever heard), Grandpa always saying “yeah, whatever”, going out to the farm with Grandpa to see what life was like there and learn a little bit about farming (none of which, I retained) and the list goes on and on and on...

I think a part of me doesn’t want to believe that I’m an ‘adult’ now with a husband and a family because I don’t want to let go of that part of my life. I know it’s part of my past now but I am going to do everything in my power to make sure I don’t forget how many great times I had in Hazy even though things have changed forever now.

Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.

In order to succeed, you must first be willing to fail

The human memory is a pretty amazing thing. The other evening TJ & I were cleaning our bedroom and had music from ITunes playing as background noise. It blew my mind how many old songs we still had on our ITunes, songs I’ve completely forgotten about over the years. But what amazes me even more is the memories that these songs bring back. Memories, I’d also completely forgotten about.

It’s funny how any of these particular songs shoot me back to a moment in my life and it’s like I am there again, living life as I did back when I loved these songs and feeling all of the feelings (the good, the bad, the ugly) that accompanied listening to them at that time.

I googled this phenomenon and found a website that referred to it as “involuntary auditory memories” which I think is an accurate description. They defined it as “the act of deliberately forming strong associations between certain pieces of music and a particular place,” also, very accurate. There’s also involuntary olfactory memories, which deal with certain scents bringing back memories but that’s a whole different blog entry for another time.

Some of the memories that these songs trigger are great ones. For example, “The Adventure” by Angels & Airwaves reminds me of when TJ & I first started dating. One of the first nights we slept together (as in, slept in the same bed together, you perverts) I had the Angels & Airwaves CD playing on repeat all night. I woke up first that morning and just listened to the music as TJ lay next to me. I remember being blown away that this guy I’ve spent so many years knowing as only a username on a computer was lying in bed next to me. It was surreal. It was perfection. That whole CD still makes me smile and think of our love blossoming. Corny, but true.

“Love Story” by Taylor Swift is another song that stirs up a happy memory for me. I used to sing the song to Melina right after she was born. I’d search it on Youtube and sing it to her over and over while I rocked her to sleep. It was my favourite song at the time and I can’t listen to it anymore without being reminded of holding a newborn Melina in my arms.

I’ve come to realize that I know literally every country song that comes on the Sirius country station TJ listens to all of the time. And I’m not even a country fan. The only reason I know these songs is because they’re all old ones, from my childhood, and I am reminded of going for drives with my Mom, going to garage sales and singing these songs at the top of my lungs. I think it’s weird that I still remember every word to these songs, fifteen years later.

Of course, there are some songs that bring back negative emotions. “Broken Wings” by Bleed The Dream reminds me of my angsty, emotional time in high school, feelings of guilt, self-loathing, etc. I try not to listen to this song anymore because it reminds me of times that I’d rather not relive.

What songs take you back to a happy point in your life?