This week was kind of the shits for me. Because I am smart and work a four-day work week, my week is now over. Because I am striving to be a half glass full kinda gal (it can be a half glass of hard liquor, right?) I am going to highlight the positive:

Things that made me smile this week:

Grace, looking at me accusingly
“Mommy, you laugh a lot”.

Edie explaining a picture that she drew to me of a box with lots of colourful blobs around it. Turns out it is a prototype (my word, not hers) of a butterfly machine she wants to make so she can crank out butterflies on a whim.

So many pretty shiny medals!

Sitting in massive over-stuffed chairs at Zoe’s (tucked to the left of the lobby at the Chateau Laurier) with some super-funny ex-colleagues, sipping on a whiskey sour and eating fancy cheese.

My mom talking about “the email” like she owns it.

Edie skiing and being all like “whatever” when she made it down the hill herself without falling/losing control.

Hearing one of Gracie’s friends saying “that’s so random” TOTALLY out of context.

Friends who are happy (I’m typing at you Mr. Friendly Neighbourhood Curator!)

Here’s to next week being better, and Go Canada Go!

(I need some of those Olympic mitts to bring to a friend in the States next week, if anyone has a lead, please let me know where I can get them).

You know what drives me crazy? Songs that have sirens in them when I’m driving. I always look the fool checking my side mirrors, rear view mirror, craning my neck to look beyond the front window and use my x-ray vision to look past the stoooopid van with no windows that is inevitably in front of me therefore totally obscuring my vision completely of anything 10 feet in front of me. I also have the girls turn off all DS’s and Leapster components so I can figure out where the siren is coming from. In split seconds I plan my good-citizen route as to where to pull over on the road in order to allow the emergency vehicle to pass and go save a life (all the while imagining the firemen/policmen/ambulance driver giving me a thumbs up for being so cooperative and then saying to each other “wow, why can’t all drivers be like her, and did you see how beautiful and poised she was? Whoever married her is a lucky man”.
And when I finally turn off the stereo to better detect where the siren is coming from, I realize that the siren was coming from my Run DMC CD.

D’oh.

And Now for Edie....

My little Edie Bikini, you are turning 5 tomorrow! I guess it’s time to stop treating you like my little baby (never!)

A few little things I want to keep in my Edie Archives forever:


I love how you tell me you love me before you go to bed, and you say love so many times that you run out of breath and heave a big sigh at the end, like you are completely spent.

I love the way you will exclaim that something is the most specialist thing to have ever been bestowed on to you, and then you offer to share it with whoever is in the room. It kills me, it is so sweet.

The way you look at me when you say you hate something, because you know I hate the word hate (hypocrite, I know) – that look shows me you will test the waters with me ten-fold in the future.

Okay, this actually drives me crazy, but I suspect it will be endearing one day. You are a messy child. The messiest little girl ever. You spill everything, you knock things down, your markers roll off the table constantly, your face is always covered in something, your always touching me with your grubby little hands, and you do all this with a tiara and princess dress on.

I love the way you call your stuffed dog Puppy Puppy Puff Puff, and you give him to me to sleep with because you feel badly that I don't have a stuffie. I love finding him on our bed.

I love that you call Lambey's fluffiest bits "The Soft".

I love that you don't walk, you hop, and I super-love that this past week even you noticed that you don't walk anywhere when you asked me if I noticed that you hop instead of walk.

I love how when you are sleeping, you look like you are hard at work, recharging your batteries.

What freaks me out is that I was such an insecure first-time Mom with Gracie, thinking that I was doing everything wrong, that I actually said out loud that I wouldn't have another child. Even when pregnant I was filled with doubt that I could do it all over again. My little girl, you've made it as easy as pie.

Love you to the stars Edie.

For Grace....

And so my dear, you turn 8 tomorrow, and your old, cliched mom just can’t believe how quickly time has passed.

Here are just a few things about you that I want to hold forever in my memory:


-Your thoughtfulness. I love love love, when posed a question that requires some thinking, the way you shift your gaze to the side, as if to block out all other stimulation, so you can give the question your full attention.

-Your interaction with Edie. While it hasn’t always been a bed of roses, this past year you have really grown into your role as big sister by reading to Edie, helping her with her “homework” and letting her tag along when you have a friend over. You still bug the crap out of her and tease her relentlessly, but the good and the bad is more balanced now.

-Your obsessive compulsiveness. Okay, I know I shouldn’t love this, but I appreciate how you need everything in order before you go to bed, with nothing on the floor and things tidied up on your desk and dresser.

-Your sense of style. Girlfriend, while your friends have been sucked into the vortex of all things sparkly, Hannah Montana-ey, Camp Rock-ey and Bratz-ey, you still like to cruise around in your velvet leisure suits. Awesome. This isn’t really new this year, but I love that you are true to your style.

-Your MP3 player! I took a chance and loaded it up with songs I feel are important to anyone just starting to listen to music, and am so tickled that you are partial to the Beach Boys, the Ramones and the Clash (I can’t put Social Distortion on there yet because he says fuck too much).

-Your diligence. You treat homework with respect, and for the most part enjoy the challenges you bring home. Except that time with the subtraction and addition patterns. That sucked.

-Your vulnerability. I don’t necessarily like being woken up at three in the morning, but I do love the confused little face that greets me when I go into your room. You don’t know what scares you, or why it scares you, it just does. And I love comforting you (and then waking your father to come lie with you because your bed is a single and mine is a king, so, y’know).

-Your attitude towards health. You are so aware of what is good for you and what isn’t. Your mantra is “healthy before junky”. You love candy, but you also know to balance things out.

-Your front crawl. God, you look so graceful doing it. I always looked like a baby giraffe going through heroin withdrawal when I did the front crawl. Likely still do. You just cut through the water.

-Your communication methods. You were so mad at me once this year that you stormed to your room and slammed your door. After a few minutes, something came flying out from under your door. It was a cartoon, frame by frame, outlining what a bitch I was being. I love that you used art as an outlet. I’m going to save that cartoon forever.

-I love that you still reach for my hand on our walks together. Those are tears of joy and love kiddo, nothing else.


These are a few things that stick out in my mind about you right now. There are a million more, and I wish I could tell you them all, pump you up with accolades for every day that you venture out into the real world. But you know what kid? You’re so awesome, you don’t need to hear it. The way you carry yourself, you unconsciously already know.

Love you to the moon.

Crap.
I have nothing to write about. I could tell you about the new wines my folks told me about that under $8 but that might bore you. I could tell you about my indulgent behaviour over the weekend, how I went to the Bytown to see a movie and then sat there when it was over and decided to stick around for the second feature, but that probably doesn't excite you (Tolstoy though man, pretty interesting cat). I could write about going to the canal on Saturday with Grace and a BOY, and Gracie being so pissed that she wasn't as good a skater as said BOY that I could see the steam coming out of her ears. And then tell you about the dinner with the BOY, by candlelight (is there any other way to eat chicken nuggets?) I could relay to you the divine conditions at the ski hill on Sunday that my hubbie and I enjoyed after we dropped the kids off for their lessons, but you don't want to hear how wonderful that one hour was, of not being hunched over a child, guiding them down the hill at a snails pace, and instead bombing and turning and feeling the mountain (now THAT was a long sentence). And you likely don't want to read about the trip to the canal today that I suspect was motivated by a chance meeting with a Beavertail (haha, nope, we were there purely for the fresh air and excercise).

Instead dear reader, I'm going to leave you with this, and let you decide if I'm the luckiest lady in the world or did something really, really tacky in a previous life.....

I’m kind of mad. Grace came home from Brownie’s last week a little upset because she said she didn’t shower enough. I probed a bit and apparently they were talking about personal hygiene and one of the things they said was that kids should bathe once a day. Maybe I’m going to get slapped here but this is certainly not how we role at our house. Particularly in the winter when they just don’t have the same opportunities to get dirty.

The kids used to get bathed daily when they were babes. But they were also a lot grosser then (poo, spit up) and it was also part of that all-important routine we had going on (bath, books, bed). Then they got older and all bowel functions were neatly deposited into the toilet and food remained in their stomachs. Now Edie has ridic dry skin, so unless she has rolled in jello and lint (don’t put anything past this kid) I try to limit her spa treatment to 2x a week. I still give her a little daily scrub to keep her clean, but her hair doesn’t get greasy yet, and she just doesn’t get all that dirty. Same with Grace. Gracie is our jock, she’ll sweat it out in the summer months playing soccer and doing track, but in the winter there just isn’t a whole lot opportunity to justify a bath everyday.

Personally, I tend to shower on a daily basis (not necessarily washing my hair each time) but I do roll around in jello and lint on a daily basis. Kidding, just checking to see if you were still reading. Okay, so I shower daily but I also have an unhealthy relationship with my treadmill that makes me sweat on a near-daily basis, so shower=good.

I resent this woman putting ideas into Gracie’s head about our society’s obsession with dictating our standards of clean. I have managed to talk her off the edge, but now I’m curious about other people’s habits – do you stir your kids in the porcelain cauldron on a daily basis?

Sometimes I get mocked for my internet addiction. But, here are a few good things the internet has done for me lately:

1) I copied this, recipe and later made it and the whole family ate it, and I felt like polishing my halo, because, y'know, lentils people, lentils is where it is at.

2) I turned MD for a few hours, diagnosing and arriving at the conclusion that Grace does not have pink eye (I would take off my stethoscope and smart glasses for more serious symptoms, don't worry).

3) I became Scorcese for a little bit and uploaded some home movies for friends and family to view on YouTube (whatevs, my Mom impresses easily - she thinks only I can do these things, therefore am a
computer AND filmmaking genius, why burst her bubble?)

4) I saved money by selecting a bunch of stuff online, proceeding to check out, and then not buying because for the masseeeve shipping expenses.

5) I burned some calories and dug up my old combat boots after watching this video.

6) I decided against this mascara and decided on this one instead after putting my smart glasses on and reading some reviews on this website.

7) I donated to Haiti.

8) I bust a gut watching this clip from the Golden Globes over and over and over again.

9) I sort translated some Norwegian stuff because I have a friend on Facebook who does her status updates in Norwegian, then all her Norwegian friends reply, and there are always lots of smiley faces and exclamation marks and my curiosity gets the better of me and I have to know what they are talking about!

10) I tried on different hairstyles from the 80's.

Being the multi-tasker (ADD) person I am, this all took place in about a 45 minute time span. I'm that good.