tiffany's spot

1. I've been sore for days. My back, neck, shoulder. I did a bunch of yoga thinking I'd stretch it out the other day. The next morning Steven had to pull me out of bed. Lots of T3s. I think I might live. 2. I really want to eat the bagel that's thawing on the counter. But then I'd have to get up and put it in the toaster. 3. Steven and the kids went to the Halloween Haunted Museum here in town last night. I stayed home. Steven did not bring me an owl. I was horribly disappointed. One does not send his wife a picture of the cutest tiniest owl in the world, and then not steal it for her at the end of the night.  4. I should probably do laundry. Or grocery shop. Or pack lunches. I should probably do a lot of things. 5. I won Phase 10. Steven pouted halfway through and had a mini tantrum. Look what he did to the cards when it was my turn to shuffle.

There's no school today. So far, I've slept in, answered a few phone calls, watched a bunch of Ellen clips on YouTube and made a feeble attempt to clean up the kitchen. Then I tell the kids they need to clean their rooms. A little while later, Elliot comes through the kitchen pushing along a giant purple bucket full of toys. I tell her she can take that right back to her room. She says that she doesn't want all the stuff in her room and is going to put it all in the basement. I tell her that the basement is going to cease being a toy room shortly, and that if there's anything she doesn't want , she can put it in a bag and we will take it to MCC, but she is not just putting it all in the basement. She was surprisingly excited by this and took a garbage bag and ran off to her room. Then Tennyson comes up and wants to know what's going on. I tell him the same thing. He admits they play with next to nothing in the overflowing buckets downstairs and takes a g

This is the noise she makes when she's shooting things. 

Elliot is in Gymnastics Level 1 this year. She loves it. She did two half-winters of Kinder Gym, and loved that, but mostly just ran around and goofed off. She's ridiculously brave though. Walking carefully down the balance beam translated to, "Run as fast as you can down the balance beam and leap off the end!" Waiting in line for her turn at a station translated to "be super bored of line, and roll around and laugh on the floor, possibly  missing turns." Anyway, this year she's a little older, a little more mature (ha), and she's in level one. She's mastered waiting in line. She can do a decent bridge. She's still being told to slow down and maybe have some poise on the balance beam. But she loves it. I'm glad I got her in. I waited in line for over 2 hours again this year, and Elliot got the last level one spot. She's have been heartbroken had I come home and told her she wasn't in. Apparently, there were people lined up at noon

I just finished reading a collection of short stories called Double Dutch for my book club. It's been a while since I read short stories as opposed to novels, but I have to say, this one was weird and a little dark and kinda spooky, and I really liked it! The very first story is about a single mom who has a fairly important and well paying job, but she doesn't have any friends, or hobbies, and her baby has no daddy. Well, I'm sure he does have a daddy somewhere , but in this story she's single-handedly raising this kid. She admits to not bonding with him, but insists that she does love him. She talks about how he's a horrible child. He doesn't share, doesn't make friends at daycare, is always in trouble for hitting (he's now 2). Then, he starts talking in his sleep. She's convinced it's Arabic, and that her son is the reincarnation of a terrorist. Not even kidding. She starts researching known terrorists who died shortly before his concepti

Today I have accomplished: 1. A nap on my couch in the middle of the afternoon, in my kitchen. 2. I took the kids to swimming lessons. 3. I hit a bunch of pokestops and got no revives . I know, it's kind of a big deal. 4. I ditched my family for 30 minutes to meet a friend at a specific pokestop so we could lure it and sit there for 30 minutes and see what turned up. 5. Showered. 6. Braided daughters' hair. 7. Transferred a spider plant from an itty bitty container to a nice hanging basket thing that has yet to be put up. CoughCoughStevenCough 8. I told Steven that he was making pizza for supper. Nicely. He's totally doing it. 9. I drank all the coffee . 10. I stayed completely caught up on my blog. Go. Me.

Yay Friday! Subbing today. It's currently 10am and I'm supervising kids in the computer lab. Nice group of kids. Some classes I find are more open to subs. These are the kids I can relate to, chat up, have a sense of humor with. Then there are the "ooh, a sub - let's get her!" classes. They are less fun. It's a challenge to get them to stop talking, to listen to instructions, to get work out of. Certain grades and ages fall more easily into one or the other category, but still, depends on the day and the kids. Friday afternoons can be an adventure too. Today I end the day with Home. Ec. They're sewing. Last time I was in, there was a kid who sewed a heart into the tip of her finger, with black thread. I have a picture here somewhere... I said to the kid, as I was taking the picture, "Keep in mind, me taking this picture in no way condones this behavior." They like when I say things like that. Today they've got me booked solid for th

Mitchell, Tennyson and Jordan are all in piano lessons again this year. Last winter, Tennyson complained all winter about not wanting to go to piano. He wanted to stay home and play, not practice piano. Practicing seemed an issue for all three of them. This year, I decided I'd give them all the choice abut whether to continue lessons before I signed them up. Surprisingly, they all said yes! Of course, a month in, the boys are again complaining about lessons, and saying they want to quit. There is no winning. I actually love that they're learning piano. They're all improving, and their music sounds more like actual songs and less like just the little tunes that are solely intended to help them remember notes and read sheet music. Especially Jordan's. this is her fifth year of lessons and she sounds great! She plays harder songs all the time, and I love listening to her. She'll even admit that her years of piano have given her a definite edge in music class at sch

Jordan's gymnastics started up again tonight. She started in grade 3 and is now in her 4th year. She's in pre-competitive, which is awesome. She's come a long way since running around, and intentionally falling off equipment when she was a goofy eight year old. She still sometimes intentionally falls of equipment as a goofy eleven year old, but she's definitely becoming a better gymnast. Tonight they were marking down how well the girls completed the different gymnastics moves. They divided them into groups and a coach took each group and had each girl, one at a time, demonstrate each move. Then they marked it down. I'll admit it, I was bored. This was an hour and a half. My butt was sore from the hard wooden bench. I may have played on my phone while pretending to watch Jordan wait in line for her turn at each station. I vaguely heard some of the other parents as they talked about technique and aptitude. Thankfully, the mom to the right of me was marking homework

I read the other day that the more things that make up our identity, the less stressful it is when any one thing is threatened. It got me thinking. I used to feel, and sometimes still do on an off-day, that I have nothing. No hobbies, no interests, nothing new, nothing to write home about. I thought about running, how I began running years ago as a weight loss tool, then ended up loving the training. Any time I'd extend my distance, or quicken my pace, I'd be over the moon about it. It was something cool that I did because I wanted to, and not because someone I knew did it. I ran my first half marathon. I was on cloud nine. I had been anxious and excited leading up to that time, and had trained like crazy. I'd run between 7 and 8 miles, several times a week and then longer runs on Saturdays. It began to feel like it wasn't even work. I felt great. My half marathon was awesome. I was more than happy with my time and I felt strong from mile one through the finish line. I&

Happy More Thanksgiving. Still a little sick today, but the headache is disappearing and my voice is coming back. Yay. I went to Thanksgiving dinner at Tornados with Steven's mom and sisters today. I made meatballs this afternoon and knew there would be an abundance of other food there, and they didn't disappoint. It was nice to catch up with everyone. Everyone gets so busy and it's rare that we're all together (we need more game nights I think). In a fun turn of events, it was decided that we would all wear sweatpants or something as equally comfortable. I was sold. I took off the hoodie and capris sweats I'd been wearing since Thursday after school, washed them, baked my meatballs for a little while and we were in! With our family, we shared dinner, laughs, more food, a few rounds of Things in a Box , and just like that it was time to get home and get ready for tomorrow's work day again. These things are over too quickly. I am thankful for so much

This summer, we went camping at Rushing River, Stephenfield and Morden, for a total of 26 nights of camping. It was our campiest summer yet! As with other summers, I refused to let my kids bring electronics. Instead, we hit the library on our way out and each kid took out a bunch of books, and I bought them each a new scribbler, sketchpad and a bunch of crayons, markers, pencil crayons, etc. We always do lots of swimming and biking and running around, but I love when we have downtime and they pull out their notebooks and write stories, or draw pictures. This year, over May Long Weekend, Elliot and Mitchell each asked me to write down their stories as they dictated them. Mitchell did some of his own too, but I wrote some for him, and I wrote some things down for Elliot. At one point, during Elliot's 3rd of 4th dictated story, I decided to pretend I was writing what she said, and instead I scratched out something entirely different. I did the same for Mitchell. First I need to

Thanksgiving Weekend, 2016. I swear I didn't glance down at the date/time on my task bar before writing 2016. How do the years go so fast? Steven and the kids went to the Verwey family Thanksgiving gathering. I stayed home. I had debated about whether to go all afternoon, but as my throat got more sore, and my voice disappeared entirely, and the four hour doses of Tylenol weren't chasing away the headache, and I managed to pass out on the couch for an hour during all the chaos in my house, I had to call it. At four o'clock I waved goodbye to my family and fell asleep on the couch for another hour. Then I woke up and was hungry for some Thanksgiving chips and coke and maybe some ice cream, and a ham sandwich to balance it all out. One would think the appetite would disappear with illness. One would not always be correct. I watched 22 Jump Street. It was dumb. I realize it's supposed to be dumb, but the only thing that kept me watching was Channing. I'd watch a

Today there was no school, so the kids and I have been home all day. We've also got a fifth kid around here somewhere since his parents work and this poor kid would have waited quietly in the garage all day for his parents to come home had I not intervened. I know. I'm a saint. The worst part of babysitting isn't that the kids wander off and you don't see them all day. No. It's not that there's an extra kid to feed. It's not that it gets any weirder around here, because that's really not even possible. The worst part is the debriefing. You know it, I know it. To avoid judgment from other parents, you've got to make sure that you and the extra kid have your stories straight. Usually kids are pretty good at figuring it out, especially if you lean a little towards intimidation. Because really, there's nobody around to help him. You've got him on his own. You know you've got about an hour until he's picked up, and you need to lay do

It's been noticed that I haven't mentioned Ingress Nights on this blog. In the spirit of not having my friends all super sad due to the lack of recognition, here it is. INGRESS NIGHT BLOG POST I started book club 3 or 4 or so years ago after seeing an add online for a book club, and joining. Vicki, one of the girls (women?)(sure) in book club seemed like someone I could be friends with, so I stalked her for a while until she reluctantly began hanging out with me. She's the one who introduced me to Ingress, an game where you drive around town, stealing portals and making links and fields. We Ingressed in Winnipeg, Carman, St. Claude, etc. On Wednesday nights after Vicki's youth leading responsibilities, we'd drive around Portage, eating ice cream, scooping up ingress gear (for epic battles later), and visiting. Our team, the Resistance, dominated Portage, mostly because there were no opponents. The people who played for the other team when we started playing

My aunt called to see if we wanted pumpkins. I said sure! We love pumpkins! Steven likes to make pumpkin puree and from there he makes the best homemade pumpkin pie ever , and we're pretty much out of last year's puree, so of course we want pumpkins. The kids have also been bugging about having pumpkins to carve this year.   On the weekend, Steven takes a run over to my aunt's, picks up the pumpkins, comes home, gets distracted, and the pumpkins stay in the van. Our van has no buckets. No storage compartments. I thought he was going to get the kids each a pumpkin to carve and maybe a couple of extra for puree. As is usually the case, I thought wrong. The van comes home loaded with pumpkins. Eighteen of them.  Don't get me wrong, free farm fresh produce is always welcome. The annoyance comes in when I go to drive the van the next day, only to have pumpkins literally rolling around my van the entire drive. The ones in the back weren't so bad, once the pile

Like all the other good moms out there, I most certainly took pictures of my kids on the first day of school, and then raced home to blog about it. I'd never wait a full month to announce that my kids, like millions of other kids in Canada, were now back at school. Nope. Because I know that everyone is eager to see if they indeed did go back to school, and if I took a picture, and if I love them enough to post the pictures. Of course I wouldn't be so crazy as to take 46 pictures of my kids on the front steps. Or in between the two trees (Elliot's idea), or in front of the van, even though it's become something of a tradition.   I'd never take pictures in front of the school, making other parents and kids wait to go in the doors. I certainly wouldn't take ten of them, in the hopes that my kids would take the whole thing seriously, because this is semi-important, dammit!       It's not like the kids were getting embarrassed by the

The list is long, let's see if I can remember any of it. 1. Mitchell had minor dental surgery. He now has silver caps on two of his six year molars. Watching him come out of the anesthetic was about the cutest, sweetest, most heartbreaking thing I've ever seen.   2. We spent a week at Rushing River. I may have to come back to this in the future. It was an awesome week, complete with an accidental 8km hike, an almost-bear sighting (be to fair, it was the neighbor's sighting, but still, we were neighbors), monstrous spiders in the outhouse, a complete lack of fish in Ontario's water system, and and and. Can't wait to go again.   3. Jordan and Tennyson were on a traveling soccer team. We had tournaments in Winnipeg in June and August.   4. First day of school. I didn't post the obligatory first-day-of-school pictures of my kids on facebook like all the good parents did, but they know I love them nonetheless. Elliot is in grade 1 this year! Wit