Many of you have asked to see the picture of my daughter’s teacher daughter with Santa and I just wanted to say that it is coming. After a short trip out of state I am now at home with family visiting for the holidays and posting may continue to be sparse for a bit. Back to your regularly scheduled blog reading soon!

Avery, catch up, Christmas, random | No Comments »

It’s time for a bullet post. Sorry. If you don’t like it you can come back another day! 

• I think I have the only five year old in THE WORLD who is afraid of Santa. I know, I know, just weeks ago I was saying she’s about to blow the lid off the whole Santa story. But she seems to have embraced her belief for the time being and that belief includes sheer terror at the thought of the Jolly Old Elf. When she was 2 and 3 years old this terror made a little more sense. But at five I thought we would be able to reason through the whole thing a little better. When I was a child I had my picture taken on Santa’s lap every year from birth to maybe 8 or 9 years old. But I have not been able to convince my daughter to sit on Santa’s lap one. single. time.  This year her school (for some bizarre reason) had a Santa come to the school and the kids were allowed to have pictures taken with him. Avery told me she most definitely did NOT want to do this. No matter how much we discussed it, tried to assuage her fears, and tried to figure out just what kind of unholy atrocities she expected to experience while sitting on the lap of a mythical gift-bringing creature, she would not give in. So I wrote a note to her teacher explaining her apprehension and that she was not to be traumatized by standing beside Santa for a picture unless she changed her mind. Well, bless the teacher’s heart, when Avery’s turn came, she held her hand and walked her up to Santa and even stood with her. So I’m not sure if we’re going to be sent home a picture of our daughter’s kindergarten teacher or if she jumped out at the last second. But either way, it’s a small victory for confidence!
• Age two has descended upon our household with the vengeance of a…well… a rabid, drooling two year old. Where two year old equals screaming defiance, stubborn refusal to let sustenance pass his delicate lips, stamping, time-outs, shrieking, climbing, hysterical wailing with a healthy second helping of OMG THE STUBBORNNESS! 
• Today I helped with a PTA fundraiser at Avery’s school which mostly involved wrapping dollar-store presents that the kids were purchasing for family. Can I just say that a two foot long back scratcher is a bitch to wrap!!! And I had the distinct pleasure of wrapping at least a dozen of them. Also? Five year olds have NO CONCEPT of buying gifts for anyone other than themselves, the little narcissists. I can’t tell you how many kids the adults had to gently explain that they had not been given ten bucks to blow on themselves, but to buy for their family members. And still, almost every one of the little narcissists came through the “check-out” with something for him/herself. Five year olds are also utterly incapable of any real thought regarding appropriate gifts for people. To my family coming for Christmas: be prepared to smile in appreciation for pencils that say “#1 Teacher”!
• It is a fact that if I walk into a salon I will ALWAYS get the stylist who I deem to have the worst haircut/style and will therefore, in my mind, give me a bad haircut/style. But sometimes I am lucky enough to be wrong and get a sweet cut by a large, Hungarian woman with a rat’s nest on her head.
• Starting tomorrow I will have houseguests every day for the next 18 days except for the 3 days we will be gone on a short vacation. So posting may be a bit sporadic while I’m busy entertaining drinking partying overeating celebrating. Happy Holidays!

Avery, Christmas, holidays, Kieran, random, school, terrible twos | 3 Comments »

Today, for the first time, I actually realized that my five year old is coming close to the point of becoming a useful person in contributing to our household (in more than general cuteness and telling goofy jokes).  She helped me clean the bathrooms y’all! THE BATHROOMS!!! It won’t be too long before I can hand one of my most hated jobs into the capable hands of my offspring! Hallelujah! 

I had totally forgotten about this part of parenting, possibly because I really haven’t experienced it yet. I mean, she can clean up the toy room and her own room. If I’m willing to wait two hours for the task to be done. But this! This is something that will make a substantial difference in my our quality of life!

Do you remember doing chores as a kid? I remember a period of time when my sisters and I had to either wash the dishes, dry the dishes or sweep the floor each day after dinner. And, like any bratty kid, I whined about this. Because why does the floor need to be swept EVERY DAY???  That little handful of crumbs we swept up could be done at least every other day or even less frequently! My mom was SO UNREASONABLE.

But now that I’m the one who sees each of those little crumbs as an assault on my home and sanity and not just annoying but basically innocuous, it is a freaking gift from the sweet baby Jesus to have a couple of my own slaves helpers to lighten the burden of housework! I realize it’s going to require a bit of training and instruction and probably a couple more years before we get there but I think after two awful pregnancies, two c-sections, two colicky babies, sleepless night, rocking and kissing and wrapping and loving and soothing and just making it through the preschool years by the skin of our teeth, I have earned myself a little slave labour help around here!***

*** And by I, of course, I mean we, because my hubby is forced to do cheerfully does a lot of the work around here.

Avery, mommy stuff, parenting | 1 Comment »

If you were a Canadian (like me) living in the United States (like me) (or even, gasp! vice versa) you might have to deal with the small unpleasantness of having to sort out the issue of immunizations and school and the territory in between. You might have to show your child’s school evidence of said shots and this may have involved all sorts of trips to and from the doctor and phone calls to and from doctor’s offices, public health offices and hospitals all over civilization and harried conversations regarding records, faxes and PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD HURRY. And after these many phone calls without any resulting yelling or expulsion of your child from her (or his) school you might relax and choose to believe that all required faxes have been sent and received and that these things will sort themselves out.

You would be wrong.

Because after three full months of school your child’s school might finally get around to checking out the forms submitted when she enrolled in school and they might call you and leave a message on your phone in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS telling you it’s Very Important that they get your child’s Immunization Records because she May Not Attend School without Proper Documentation of her Vaccinations.

So you, being a responsible parents, would speak with the school nurses and discuss the reasons for the delinquent information (our records are in Canada and apparently faxing documents across the border is Very Hard). The nurses would probably be calmed by your Responsible Parent Voice and give you permission to bring in your personal documentation of your child’s frequent puncturage the following Monday. Which you would go ahead and do because you care about following rules.

When you bring the school nurse the information she requires she would reward your conscientiousness with a damning proclamation; your child is not fully vaccinated! UNCLEAN!!! The USA requires Hepatitis B vaccinations and Canada does not. Your child must not be allowed to pollute the school air with her dirty, unvaccinated little self one second longer (nevermind that she has already attended school for three months)!

And so you might be told to take your child home so as not to defile the purity of the school atmosphere. And your child might be brought from her classroom in tears, not wanting to leave school and you might feel ashamed, as though you had done something wrong, even though you know you haven’t.

If you were like me you might start playing phone tag (once again) with two different Canadian offices to try and get your child’s immunization records faxed to your new doctor’s office so that your doctor can sign a form for the school so they can untie the giant knot their panties are in. But both offices say they faxed those forms back in September like you asked them to. When you ask them to do it again you would probably discover that the number they originally faxed to was incorrect. So you would get them to do it again.

You would make phone calls to the doctor’s office to see if your leperous child can be immunized today so that she can return to school tomorrow. The child would weep because she fears shots like little else in this world. I mean *if* you had that kind of a kid.

And after your child is punctured you would probably ask them to confirm that they received the faxes from Canada. But they would dismiss you disdainfully, saying they had received no such fax. Because that’s the kind of day it is, and apparently fax machines in Canada are made from twigs and leaves and therefore take much longer to cross the border to America, the blessed land of technological ingenuity. 

So you would go home and although you should be making more calls to verbally kick some ass you might be feeling a tad discouraged and you might need to break down and cry for a while. Especially after your husband does some searching online and discovers that the first fax number, given to you in September was actually the right one and not the one given to you today. Then you might just want to lock yourself in the closet for a few years. I mean, that’s how I would feel if it were me.

But it’s so totally not me.

Avery, medical, moving, not that it happened to me, rants, school | 5 Comments »

Oh good grief! We’ve been hit by the Stinkeye once again. Both kids, both eyes. Avery hasn’t had pinkeye since she was really little and is freaking out and losing her mind every time I come at her with the antibiotic ointment (leftover from the last bout of conjunctivitis, and yes, I know you’re not supposed to do that, but since pinkeye ALWAYS shows up at our house late Friday night that means it’s pretty complicated to find a doctor to prescribe anything until Monday so YES I KEPT THE DAMN TUBES OF OINTMENT!!!!) like I’m coming at her with hot pokers and saying “It won’t hurt a bit, I PROMISE!”  

Meanwhile we have friends visiting and I’m sure they wish they’d never come to our den of bacterial iniquity.  

And really, I have nothing else to write about because I have also been struck down by the common cold some kind of plague and am busy whining my face off suffering quietly while groaning about lovingly tending to my children’s goopy eyes. Back soon, my friends.

Avery, Kieran, medical, parenting | No Comments »

• When reading a certain favourite story she says “Mommy, this is my favourite page of this story because I like the word arose.” I totally get that. I love that kind of language. It’s why I loved to read the Oz books and Lucy Maud Montgomery’s and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s stories. 
• She is as easily discouraged by her inability to do things perfectly the first time as I am, despite my concerted efforts to not pass on this trait and show her that all that is important is that she try her best.
• She frequently sits down to write stories. When I was a child I loved to do this. Her most recent titles? The Lonely Pony and The Boy Who Was Allergic to Flowers.
• Her inability to understand mean kids’ actions or why anyone would have a problem listening to and immediately obeying the teacher or other authorities. We are rule-followers, her and I.
• She loves to give gifts and is constantly making cards and “presents” for people. One of her favourite imaginary games to play with her little brother is “giving presents” where they wrap up their toys in their special blankets and solemnly present them to each other.  
• She has a bossy side and it shows up frequently in her interactions with her little brother as mine did with my sisters.
• She wants to be told, over and over, that she is loved and accepted and appreciated and that she is good enough.

I know she won’t be an exact copy, but it’s frightening how many of my own traits I recognize in her. Some are thrilling. Others make me worry for the hard lessons she will have to learn as she grows. It’s like watching a younger version of myself going out to make the same mistakes and it feels like I have so little power to stop it. I try to gently guide her to stand up for herself and I suspect she has more chutzpah than I ever did. I just hope I can figure out the right way to nurture it.

Avery, mommy stuff, parenting | 2 Comments »

I’ve been seeing this meme around lately and because I’m never one to wait to for an invitation I’m showing up uninvited and I brought a few friends. Hope that’s ok.

(Actually this is a total lie. I’m totally not a party-crashing kind of person and I would be absolutely mortified to do this in real life but hello, it’s a blog, and no one gives a crap about memes!)

So the meme involves finding your sixth photo folder and then showing the sixth picture from that folder. Since I’m a mac-whore I translated that into mac and made it work in iPhoto and this is the picture, taken on our first digital camera which probably had all of half a mega-pixel:

This is a picture of my daughter from around November 2003 and it’s actually the 5th and not the 6th picutre but I figured you’d forgive me. They’re basically the same pose except in the other one Avery had one bright red devil-eye and one normal eye. The scene is this: I was taking advantage of one of the few moments of solace we’d had from crying in the 4 months since she was born and trying to capture a happy moment and taking pictures of her adorable smooshy self sitting on our wingback chair in the living room seemed like a good way to do that.

In truth, the majority of the first few months she looked more like this:

So chill-inducing precious, right? That’s from the same folder.

In hindsight, I am wondering if maybe she was scared of the bizarre assortment of freaky animals hanging over her bed and stuffed in every corner and crevice.  If I was stuck in a cage with some of those beasties I might cry, too! I’m not sure if it is better to think that I was just a terribly insensitive mother or that she was the most miserable, unhappy child ever to be birthed by a clueless mother.

Oh and since we’re poking around in that folder let’s take a closer look at that hair (and by closer I mean not really any closer because the crappy old digital pictures don’t allow much zooming and cropping):

Hard to believe that hair turned into this in a matter of months, isn’t it?

Look at those cheeks. Nom, nom, nom.

Avery, narcissism | 2 Comments »

Oy. I have been meaning to write all week! But what with the very serious business of having coffee breaks and sitting around girl-talking and shopping…well, there just aren’t enough hours in the day! We have two years of face-to-face time to make up for!

Major moment of the week: My daughter told her auntie (my visiting best friend) that she KISSED A BOY IN HER CLASS!!!  I suspect this is the first of many moments when I lament that this is exactly the kind of thing you don’t tell your mom. And then I may have shed a tear or two. Because really? She’s chasing and kissing boys in he class? I was so NOT that kid. And she is so much like me that I expect her to be exactly like me. But she is that kid. So we had to have a talk about personal boundaries and the appropriate amount of contact between classmates. And NOT KISSING ANYMORE BOYS UNTIL SHE’S 45.  

More on this later. I’ll be back soon. Cheers!

Avery, parenting, random | No Comments »

Many of you asked me to post a picture of Avery’s peanut butter survey that I wrote about the other day so here it is. I expect you are a bit disappointed as you may have been expecting a tidy sheet with columns and neat rows of legible printing. Well, she’s only 5 people! But you can see that she wrote out the names in pen and then the pencil check marks are next to the names of those kids who said they liked peanut butter. In case you need some interpretation of the “information” I am providing the translation below:

Duoo Lik Penat Batr (Do you like peanut butter?)

Niklis (Nicholas) Reena (Reena) Jack (Jack)

Cial (Kyle) Cia (Kya) Iay (Alyia)

Yasmin (Yasmin) Jiaoleeana (Juliana)

Romee (Romy) Sbastin (Sebastian)

Kasee (Kasey) David (David)

Alasin (Allison) Louias (Louis)

Alasoja (Alessandra)

It turns out I was wrong about her remembering 18 names. There are 20 kids in Avery’s class, if you don’t count Avery. So either she was mistaken when she told me she only missed 3 kids and she actually missed 5. Or Perhaps 2 of the kids she missed were absent that day in which case she was right that she only missed 3 of the 18 kids who were in school.

Avery, quirky kids | 8 Comments »

If, without prompting of any kind, your child sits down before going to school in the morning and writes out a class roster which she takes to Kindergarten (without your knowledge or permission) in order to conduct a survey of her classmates to find out who likes (and doesn’t like) peanut butter and comes home with the results of her informal poll.  And if she had remembered the names of 18 of her 21 classmates and scrawled her mangled check marks besides names to indicate “yay” or “nay”.  If all these things had happened, you might have a Type A personality.

Avery, family, quirky kids, the good stuff | 6 Comments »