Dec 10

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!
Nov 27

Ok, parents of little boys (or parents of girls who display the following behaviours), tell me something! Do your sons have a serious aversion to clothing? Because my two year old son has recently developed a debilitating obsession with being naked as much as possible. How am I supposed to deal with this? How do I deal with the tantrums every time we announce it’s time to get dressed, the refusal to keep his clothes on, the demands for “MOOH NAKIT!!!” and the flailing elbows and knees when we try to dress him? And WHY is he so resistant to clothing all of a sudden when he never was before?  As cute as he is when he runs around in the buck, there are still certain occasions where it is unacceptable to show up unclothed. Help!

Also, guess which new and annoying word has now become part of the boy-child’s vocabulary? That’s right. WHY.  

I’m screwed, aren’t I?

Nov 25

I’ve heard this rumour about houseplants. Something about them needing natural light and water? Anyone heard that before? Bizarre, I know! But I have this friend (not at ALL me) who had two substantial sized houseplants that were stored in giant cardboard boxes in a storage facility while she moved to a foreign country (possibly the USA, Boston area. Maybe.). And it took longer than anticipated for her plants (along with all her other belongings to be delivered to her new home and so when the plants finally arrived on the big truck they had been in the dark for somewhere in the vicinity of three months.

She wasn’t expecting them to have survived.  Because houseplants that go without light or water for three months are generally categorized as compost material and not plant life. But they had, in fact, survived their ordeal and although they did look a bit rough, they did not look dead.  

And so my friend took the two plants and placed them on her deck so that they would have maximum exposure to daylight and hopefully recover from their long, dark night.

What my friend did not take into account was the fact that her east-facing deck also faces the ocean and is the direct recipient of the sun’s first rays as it rises over the horizon and that makes it exactly the same as placing those two poor plants in front of an enormous bonfire. On the surface of the sun.  And so within 24 hours the plants had been sunburned within an inch of their lives and the few remaining leaves had shrivelled up and burned up into small piles of ashes around each pot.  

Most people would give up the fight at this point but not my friend.  Oh no. She was willing to take even more dramatic measures to give her little green brownish friends a chance at life! So she took a pair of kitchen shears and clipped and trimmed hacked and chopped until there was nothing left but a stump in each pot. And then she made several small sacrifices of fertilizer to the gods of horticulture and hoped for the best.

Miraculously, the plants came back with new growth in a matter of a few short weeks and before long they were small, but healthy looking houseplants once again! 

So after the lives of these two houseplants, though fraught with peril, had survived intact and life had resumed as normal, my friend may have been a tad dismayed to discover her two year old standing beside a suspiciously naked fern stalk holding fistfuls of leaves.

Not that it happened to me. I’m just saying, it might feel like getting bitch-slapped up one side and down the other.

Nov 23

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.

Nov 13

This isn’t a great picture but can you see all the bruises on this kid? Wait - I think I heard a knock at the door. Probably CPS coming to interrogate me.

Phew. Just my very nervous imagination.

This kid is having serious issues with falling down. You can maybe see 4 different bruises on his face there if you look closely (top left: walking into a door, top right: falling down and hitting head, under eye: a mysterious and large bruise that appeared after a peaceful night’s sleep [WTF???] and over the bridge of his nose: falling face first off a play structure). There are actually 3 more that you can’t see (in hairline: playing too rough and fell and smacked head, middle of forehead: faded bruise from same, under chin: falling off couch).  

I am really starting to be anxious about people misinterpreting my kid’s many bruises! Would it be weird if I started all my conversations with a disclaimer? The kid is just totally fearless and that results in a black and blue face.  The first thing he did after we arrived at our hotel on Sunday was to take a nosedive five feet off the hotel’s playground equipment and land on his nose. There was a lot of blood and he fell from so high I was formulating a plan to find the nearest ER by the time I picked him up from the ground. Thankfully it turned out not to be too serious  and he only had a bruise in the end.

You can imagine how many other bruises were added to his collection when we spent the day in the hotel’s waterpark.

Nope, no possible way to hurt myself here Mom!

Why won’t you let me run around???

Incidentally, it’s very hard to keep your kids from throwing themselves into a waterfall when you’ve just spent a day at a waterpark full of spraying and splashing water. The difference is lost on them.

Oct 12

Here we are. Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. Well, actually it will come and go tomorrow. But in our household it came today. Because, while much of America gets Columbus Day off tomorrow, my hubby’s employer didn’t jump on that bandwagon. So our little family of four celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving by cooking all day and feasting on turkey at dinner time. I don’t want to make any guesses about how old the turkey we purchased may or may not be since the American grocery stores won’t be stocking up on turkeys for quite a few weeks yet. 

Nonetheless, it all tasted good and I was able to find the bread cubes for the stuffing and the cranberries for the cranberry sauce. We didn’t miss any key items and we had a lovely dinner.

How is it that it looks totally underwhelming in the picture even though I cooked and baked all day yesterday AND today to make that baby happen? 

We missed our family and friends dearly today, but we had each other and that was good enough for this year. On the plus side, we barely made a dent in the 14 pound turkey which means lots of leftovers!

We had one other special visitor with us at the dinner table.  Can you see it?

No? Look closer…

If you were thinking that Kieran’s right eye is looking especially pink and gooey then you would be right.  Looks like we’re in for an unexpected visit from the Pinkeye Fairy.  Lucky us!  And I have no idea what I’m going to do tomorrow if our pediatrician’s office is closed.  I don’t know what I can do on weekends except go to the emergency room. Are we really expected to go to the ER just to get a prescription for eye drops? I hope not!

I just reread this post and realized how fantastically boring it is.  Sorry about that. I lost my funny somewhere between mashing the potatoes and carving the turkey. It’ll be better tomorrow (I hope).

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Sep 22

Just imagine, if you will, the look of horror on your hypothetical husband’s face when he walks into the room and asks why on earth you deleted EVERY LAST THING out of the downloads folder on the laptop?  And you look at him, and blink, because surely he is joking. While you are ignorant of nearly all things technological, surely, SURELY HE KNOWS you are not stupid enough to delete everything from the precious downloads folder on the laptop!

And then you might just have a flash of a memory go off way in the recesses of your memory of a moment not too long ago when you had the laptop open on the counter in the kitchen. And you *might* have been momentarily distracted by something and as you turned around your eye caught your two year old mashing the keyboard with glee.  

If that happened you *might* look at your fuming husband, who has smoke coming out of his ears, with wide, innocent eyes and say “Why, no! I have NO IDEA what happened!”

Not that it happened to me.  But that sure would have SUCKED if it had!

Sep 19

…when your child has an expressive speech delay? What changes? 

Nothing.

Except everything changes just a little. Or maybe it’s just me. There was always a niggling concern in the back of my head, even when most people assured me that all boys are slow to talk, my son didn’t talk until he was 4. I wanted to know. And I didn’t want to get to a point where I wished I had taken steps to help him earlier.

Still, hearing the words out loud made my heart hurt just a little. Even though I know his speech problems are due to his many ear problems and not some failing of mine. Even though I know he will likely catch up to his peers without a problem now that he is getting help from Early Intervention. Even though I know that his so-called “therapy” will be like play time and he will probably love every minute of it.

Still. A little part of my heart is sad knowing my baby, through no fault of his own, isn’t living up to his potential.

I know, I know. Suck it up, princess. I should be thanking my lucky stars that we’ve got help and so fast. I should be grateful that he doesn’t have more serious problems. That a year from now my son will mostly likely be yammering until my head aches, just like his sister. I am not complaining. I’m truly thankful that he is going to be getting the help he needs. 

Maybe what really makes me sad is I am realizing this is the first of many times in his life where he may not reach his full potential, whether by his choice or not.  As a parent I want nothing more than to see my kids fulfill all the promise I see in them. Even if it’s something as trivial as being able to say “I’m sorry I just hit my sister in the head with this matchbox car.” 

Sep 11

Some of this…

Aaaaand a little of this…

And let’s not forget this…

And this too…

Aug 30

We’ve had such a stupid week that I have neglected to say what an awesome weekend we had pretending we are still kidless and young enough to rock and roll all night and party evah-ree-day.  Some Canadian friends came down to visit us (it is SO WEIRD to be classifying friends by what country they’re from!) and it was so much fun. While we’ve been having a good time doing the tourist thing here in Boston, we’ve really been missing spending time with good friends who we know and who know us. 

To top off the fun of having our friends here the clouds parted and the angels sang and Tina offered to babysit so we could go out sans kids which was great because we basically acted like kids the whole night. 

First, we giggled at the name of a Chinese restaurant because we’re all 8 years old….

 

Then we went to a bar that had it’s menu in the form of a giant periodic table and lab stools for seating because the four of us are HUGE GEEKS and that’s exactly the kind of gimmick that catches our attention.

Then we annoyed our server because we aren’t familiar with American beers. Once we got the beer we cracked open a nice cold can of Canadian superiority over the lower alcohol content of sissy American beers. Ok, well I didn’t actually have any beer because I’m a big baby and only drink alcoholic drinks that taste like sugar fruity and sweet. 

But it was so much fun to just let loose and laugh! S and T, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR VISITING! And T, thanks for this “Blue Steel” picture. Because it makes me happy every time I look at it.

Know what else made me happier than is reasonable? Spending an hour in a drug store investigating products that are not sold in Canada or that are different between Canada and the US, and having friends who agreed with us when we said “That is just SO WEIRD.” Like why the unit price is posted for every item? Like I care that I’m getting the best deal per pound on deodorant? We did spend a long time searching for the item in the store with the most expensive unit price (I think it was condoms, if you’re wondering). It may have been kind of a lame and geeky night out. But I embrace it!

The next day we went to the beach where we quickly buried our kids in the sand so wouldn’t have to pay too much attention to them:

 

But when we started burying our friends in the sand, too, people started to look at us funny.  

Still, a good time was had by all. My son personally inspected each grain of sand and pronounced it acceptable.

Then we decided to have dinner at the “Cheers Bar” (the outside of the bar was filmed as the outside of the bar in the hit TV show Cheers, the inside was not shown in the show, nor does the inside resemble the set of Cheers) …

…which is not actually called “Cheers” but is actually called “The Bull & Finch Pub“…

…and where everyone did not actually know our name so much as want to take our money. But the service was great, the food was good (and reasonably priced) and we had a fantastic time together.

Our friends cheered up immensely and it is only because I had such a FABULOUS weekend that I did not reach through the phone and pull out the spleen of our contact at the moving company when he told us that our belongings will now not be reaching us until September 11. And by September 11, I’m pretty sure he means December.

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