music and love (part one)

I spent the day at the Ottawa Folk Festival today. It's pretty much the equivalent of the high holidays in our little heathen household and we try and spend as much time there as possible each year.

Of course, 'as much time as possible' changes once you have kids. I ran into my friend K. today, who was there with her almost-four-year old daughter. We exchanged hugs and then she ran off, calling over her shoulder, "when you're here with kids, you don't get to see anything!"

We paid a small fortune to a babysitter today to look after four year old D., so that we would actually get to take in some music. We brought a library's worth of books and magazines for our nine year old, kept him steadily supplied with food and drink (this week end is turning out to be very expensive) and did a fair bit of compromising as to which concerts we would choose to attend.

And we had fun.

But, too soon for me, S. announced that he had had enough and wanted to leave (in all fairness to him, this was at 7:00 and we had been at the music festival since shortly after noon). We insisted on staying to hear Penny Lang, he got sulky and I got mad.

It wasn't that he kept me from enjoying the concert. Or even that I really minded leaving, all that much (we are having bizarrely cold weather in Ottawa and the temperature was dropping rapidly). I was mad that he was so damned ungrateful.

Once we got home (and I sent my spouse, who doesn't mind freezing his ass off for music, back to the folk festival), S. did his thing and I did mine and we just basically stayed out of each other's way for the couple of hours before bedtime.

But I did something this evening I'd been meaning to do for a while; the first in a series of writing exercises, called "Words in a Row" devised by Birdie Jaworski, a contributing editor over at BlogHer.

My contribution can be found in the comments. As a way to unlock writing ideas, it really worked for me, but the story that flows from the points I wrote there will wait for another time.

Because writing them also reminded me how much I love S., what a good time we have together and how much I appreciate him. He is a bright, funny and very loving child. We had such a good time together today.

So when I went upstairs to turn off his light, I told him all that.

He is, after all, only nine years old and should be allowed to be a little immature.

And now, I'm off to bed. He's having trouble sleeping and I'm going to let him crawl in with me until his father gets home.