The City Worker’s Strike this past June effectively shut-down summer camp programmes for the children, halted garbage pick-up around the city, caused splash pads and pool/swim programmes to not open and interruption of other services. This went on for 39 days. The last City Worker’s Union strike action happened in the summer of 2002 when Pope John Paul II toured Toronto. What an embarrassment that was! I remember walking around Chinatowne and seeing stacks of garbage piled higher than a basketball hoop on both sides of Spadina Street. Chinatowne smells funky even under the best of conditions folks and this made things far worse.

The shop owners would mix up buckets of Lysol disinfectant in mop pails and splash the sidewalks, scrubbing and spreading it around with industrial push brooms. Flies, bees and rats were everywhere. It stunk terribly. And this just about happened again although I avoided Chinatowne for this duration.

The Strike was finally resolved and the union workers have resumed services such as city-operated splash pads and pools, albeit for just the three weeks of summer vacation for the kids remaining before Labor Day and back to school thereafter.

My son and I have been going down to the lake almost daily. I get along great with my almost 5-year old son. Going to the lake is both a treat and a daily ritual for us. There are no arguments or dissension from him when I ask him to pick up his toys or to eat is food in the mornings before we leave for the day. He knows that ‘good behavior’ will be rewarded. We sometimes skip the still-required afternoon nap and there is a bit of fussing later on that evening because of it. I don’t like this. It is as if right now one nap is too many and no nap at all is most definitely too few. It’s a delicate balance between not enough and too many.

I suppose that Child Behaviorists would tell me that this fussy argumentative attitude we sometimes experience from him in the early evening. Getting him ready for bedtime for instance, is a chore. I’m sure the experts will say that this is ‘totally normal and healthy for a child his age‘ further stating their stoic and clinical rhetoric like ‘…he is merely asserting his developing individuality by segregating himself from the parental agenda’ blah-blah-blah. I say no, -he is just cranky because he missed his nap. End of story.