tiffany's spot

Good morning, people! Where to start? Oh! With an early morning walk, no breakfast, all the coffee and the ever-awesome early-morning-all-the-coffee-no-breakfast jitters. I love coffee high. We went on a road trip this summer. BC, Vancouver Island, all the good places. Nobody fell off any mountains, was eaten by a bear or was brutally pummeled by a sibling in the many hours spent in the van. Win win win. I have pictures here..... somewhere, but that would involve a lot more than just typing some stuff out. School started, two days ago for the kids. Not for me. Ah well. Subbing for now still, I suppose. Elliot is in grade 2 this year and this morning as she comes out ready for her day it occurs to me she's now worn the same outfit for the entire 3 days of this school year so far. I'm sure nobody will notice. Mitchell is in grade 4, the oldest class in his school. It's weird, because he never seems like the oldest anything to me. Tennyson  is in grade 5, first year at a ...

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...

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.

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 ...

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...

"Mommy! Just cover me up with groceries!" Okay. Moments later: "Mommy, Mommy! It hurts!" (I'm translating. She actually said "Mommy, Mommy! It huhhts! Gotta love the speech impediments). As a responsible, loving parent, I said, loudly (people laughed, they are as awful I as I am), "Stop wiggling around! You're squishing my bread! We are almost to the till!"

Elliot : (from "somewhere" down the hall) Can someone wipe my bum! Me : (from the living room) Hang on! Elliot : Wipe my bum RIGHT NOW. Me : Excuse me? Elliot : Excuse me? Me : You are being very rude. Elliot : You are being very rude. Me : I'm gonna spank you! Elliot : I'm gonna spank you! A short recess while I realize my across-the-house threats and scolding are not very, well, threatening. Elliot : Wipe! My! Bum! Me : In a sec. I fire up another game of solitaire on the computer. Elliot : WIPE MY BUM! I finish the game. I head to the bathroom. The princess is sitting happily grinning at me from her throne. Me : You are not being very nice. Elliot : I like you! Me : Yeah. That's because I'm nice. Superior parenting happens in my house in a moment by moment basis. I always figure if I dawdle she'll be more eager to start looking after her own toileting. I think usually she just gives up and leaves, sans wiping. Actually no, ...

Elliot loves her books. She can sit here and flip through books and study the pictures, or make up stories, or re-tell stories she knows from hearing them so much. Her nursery school teachers tell me she can often be found sitting on the couch in the reading area at nursery school, doing exactly this same thing. I'm thinking that in a few years she'll be up in a tree beside her big sister, with her own book in her hands.

I'm washing dishes. Steven is clearing the table and putting leftovers into a container. It is a riveting opening scene for this blog post. I know, you don't have to tell me. "Just save enough rice for that amount of sauce to make sense," I say. "In what?" Steven asks. "I don't know, that black thing I cooked veggies in." "There's not even enough to bother using that." "I don't know, just use a bowl." "A what?" "A cereal bowl." "Huh?" We argue all the time about who is deafer. It's definitely him. I think it's probably more that we only half-listen half of the time. Actually, when I can't hear him it's because he mumbles. Then when I finally figure it out I still say "huh" a few times and he repeats himself a few more times because he hasn't caught on yet that I'm messing with him. "Huh?" he asks a final time. I sigh at his obvious ...

Jordan goes back to school on Monday. It's kind of sad that the holidays just whirred by like this. It's been nice having her home. On the other hand, the fighting is driving me nuts. It's not like summer holidays where we spend half the day at the park and the other half the day in the back yard running and digging and sweating and getting tired. The kids are kind of in each others faces all day, and they're starting to show serious signs of wanting to rip those faces off. I feel guilty, because I never wanted to be one of those moms who wanted her kids to go back to school, and I don't, because those days are long and I worry about Jordan when she's not here, but I think the kids need more routine again and maybe a break from each other. I feel guilty even writing this. I liked kindergarten last year. My girl went to school in the morning and was home in time for lunch and the rest of the day she was here where she was supposed to be. It saddens me t...

My baby. I affectionately refer to her as a menace. I smile and say it to her with my happy mommy/baby voice and she giggles evilly and with much joy that Mommy is obviously saying something funny to her. I was going to relish my last baby - the baby fuzz head, the sweet baby smell, the tiny baby cuddles. Elliot had her own ideas from the start. She's never been cuddly. She's lovey and likes to be around me, and she wants to be up in my arms, but she won't cuddle. She just wants a perch to look around. She gets angry if I sit down. I am her mommy chariot. If I want to sit with her at the table I had better have some good incentive. Elliot doesn't eat. At least not anything I try to feed her. Things she won't eat: meat vegetables boiled eggs noodles potatoes soup pasta sauce rice cantaloupe oranges pineapple honeydew squash did I mention meat and vegetables? Those food groups are pretty much off her list. Things she will eat: bread cereal milk coffee (she climbs on t...