Sun streams through the window, the cheerful, basking sun of early spring. We’ve got nowhere to be, so we sit together in a bakery with a steaming mug of tea, a warm bottle of milk and a slice of banana bread to share. We get kissed by two basset hounds and a golden retriever. We go rock-hunting on the beach (they taste salty: we checked), and our feet get wet from stomping in the slop at low tide. A banner day. A day during which shoe-bombers and land mines and faraway horrors do not exist. Restoration for the news-weary soul.

In case you haven’t had a day like that lately, go here with your headphones on and the volume turned up. On a ‘time-to-go-live-in-the-woods’ day, when your emotional arteries are clogged. And you might think, like I did: somehow, someday, we’re going to get through to each other. How can we be so creative, so joyful, and not figure it out?

Someday, I’m going to be so grown-up. I’m going to wear a BRA. I’m going to wear a big dress and be married.

I’m going to be a mommy.

I’m going to take my babies to Point Pleasant Park and take pictures of them by the frog pond. I’m going to take my babies sailing and feed them crackers and in the winter we’ll go sledding.

I’m going to pack their lunch with frozen juice boxes, the ones with the bendy straws, so they’re all slushy and cold by noontime. I’m going to tease my babies and say, “There goes the Loch Ness Monster! OOPS! You just missed him!”

I’m going to let my babies eat as much Cheez Whiz as they want. I’m going to build them a swingset in the backyard, and our house will always smell like cookies. My babies will have treasure chests full of witches and ghosts and pirates. They’ll dress up and have a parade, and I’ll watch my babies and clap for them.

Someday, I’m going to be so grown-up.

A big hit: vanilla bean frappuccino with ground-up chocolate chips. Remove straw from mouth at own peril.

We just spent twenty-five dollars on organic milk, said Justin the other day, after groceries. How come he gets free-range chicken, and we get frozen peas?

We say he eats what we eat, but he doesn’t. He eats better. Bags of juicy, organic pears from halfway around the world, defying the seasons at ten bucks a pop. Locally-grown lamb with fresh-ground north indian spice. Dairy products from cows who each enjoy their own personal la-z-boy, plasma-screen TV with universal remote control and beer-dispensing ballcap. It’s amazing how much the bills have grown, with the addition of one small boy.

Much of it lands in the compost. We simmer, chop, season, oooh, ahh and present with a flourish. Then we turn away, holding our breath, pretending we don’t care. He pokes, swipes, stares blankly. Five minutes later, he munches happily on toast crusts.

We're in constant search of new tricks and small victories. The latest culinary discovery: he is his mother’s son. Ketchup, on anything, is good. On eggs. On alphabet pasta. On fingers. On tofu. Little, teeny, perfect white squares, the slippery, tasteless kind that bobs in miso soup, lined up in a row and squirted upon with a straight red line, all the way across. He ate half a block this way, last night. And nothing else.

Toddlers require a nutritional shift in thinking: from the balanced meal to the balanced week. Doing so greatly reduces mealtime teeth-gnashing. If today is an All-Orange day and tomorrow is an All-Fishstick day, so be it.

That's halfway to perfection.

Shiny red trucks and yellow boots. Lugnuts and buckets and ladders to grab, horns that HONK! and giant tires with grooves for pokey fingers.

I don’t shadow him as close as I probably should. It’s because I love watching him from a distance, his feet working hard to keep up with the thrills of temptation and freedom. What does he see? A coil of air hose, all the way to the roof. He lights up, ventures to it and tugs. Sproing! Satisfaction.

Even better than watching him wander? Watching him come back to me, full of tall tales and goodies.

For the first time, Justin and I are a bit sick of each other.

We’re companionable enough, but he nags me to use fewer pots while cooking. I snap at him for getting mad about the dirty dishes, and whine about being a full-time laundress. He stresses about our grocery bills, and I sulk because a twelve-dollar block of guinness cheese fools me, for a moment, into thinking our life is reaching some acceptable grade of carefree.

The ‘us’ we used to be is on hiatus. At least I hope it is – a hiatus assumes a return.

In having a child, we’ve matured, become fuller, more intimate. Yet we’re mundane, disconnected. We stand together, staring off into space in the same general direction.

Two years ago, we were ourselves. I wasn’t pregnant yet.

Today we pour so much physical affection into our son, we hardly have any left for each other. Money is woe. We’ve both pressed the restart button on our careers, both wracked with insecurity. The lifestyle we treasured is gone thanks to the double-whammy of parenthood and easternhood. We both feel a little lost, shadows of who we used to be.

I used to scoff at people who’d say that marriage takes work. Whoever says that married the wrong person. I couldn’t imagine not having the energy to treasure this man.

But now, I’m a cliché. From a sparkling partnership full of adventure to a dishevelled wife in sweats with a messy kitchen, and fantastic photo albums collecting dust on the bookshelf. At least we’re still united by the same fear: being boring. But it’s upon us, and it’s soul-sucking.

I spend a lot of time convincing myself I’m content.

Hoping that somehow, just having these memories makes me who I am. But it’s not enough. Am I selfish to admit it? A shallow mother? I want more of them, more of who we were. But we’re so far removed, I don’t know what to do about it.

Thormanby is sometimes one island, sometimes two.

A huge crescent beach forms a white sand bridge at low tide, and a waterway opens to the Georgia Strait at high tide. A narrow channel dominates the journey: to get to Thormanby, you surf downhill for two hours straight.

To get home, you fight for every boat length.

A craggy bit of rock at the mouth of the crescent bay marks the turning point.

On the way home, just before pushing into the channel, you take shelter in this calm pool to gather your wits. Once you start, you can’t stop or rest. Nose to the wind, mind empty and shoulders throbbing. Everything else in your life is insignificant until you see the dock.

The sea beyond here is confused and angry as ten-foot swells converge from all directions.

You sit in the eddy watching the froth, waiting pointlessly for a break in the mayhem, an entrance point that won't come. You must paddle far beyond the crag, out into the channel in the opposite direction. Then round into the currents and wind, steering and paddling frantically, vulnerable to sidelong gusts and waves.

Head on, the kayak teeter-totters on the peak of every crest. The same climb, the same crash, a thousand times over.

You contemplate courses of action for giving up, but the tumultuous shoreline is even less appealing than open water. So you push against wind, tide and the crush of a bottleneck, working harder than you ever have in your life to progress a little better than backwards.

You set tiny milestones: that arbutus tree, that cabin, those seals. See if I can give that much more. As they lurch past, strength grows. More water lies behind than ahead.

And then you’re struck: this is fun. You relish the roar and the drench, your mechanical bull, and whoop for more. Every sensation imprints itself on you, and a great gulf opens up between what you’ve experienced and what you could ever describe.

It’s not often in life that we are truly, deeply invigorated.

Parenthood, perhaps, is one of those bright flashes, one of those great trials that bonds us. I see pregnant women now and think of waiting in that eddy, filled with uncertainty. There’s progress now, fourteen months later. Milestones passed. Some with more grace than others, but passed nonetheless.