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 ...

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...

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...

Jordan has suddenly become a person. I know, I was surprised too. She's always been a person, but she's been extra "persony" lately, in many ways. She has a social life. Seriously, she has more friends than I do. She phones them, they coordinate events they're going to, they arrange to travel to school functions together, they set up play dates. When friends come over, they disappear into Jordan's room to gossip (we'll be having a talk about this shortly), and come out once in a while to eat and drink snacks, and then they disappear again. No more running around and screaming and laughing until I threaten to shut down play dates. She's entering some level of pre-puberty. I'd call it what it is and say she's hitting puberty, but I'd rather not. She's little. I'm going to add the "pre" until she's about 25. Dropping a bunch of womanly hormones into a child has been awesome. (By awesome, I mean horrendous) She ha...

I really didn't. I would never do things that would make people shake their heads, or smirk, or any of that other stuff. People shouldn't anyway, because that would be unkind , especially since I don't mock people . For instance: Let's just get ingress out of the way, since Steven thinks it's incredibly nerdy and I'd hate to give him more ammo to make fun of it all: I did not relentlessly heckle complete strangers from opposing factions (in communications, not in person) when they came through town just before the weekend, and destroyed only two of my portals. That wouldn't be good sportsmanship. I also did not avoid having a Thanksgiving drink all weekend with my husband, just in case the bad guys came back through at the end of the weekend (okay, I'll admit, I had serious suspicions. Probably because he said "see you soon....") I also did not ditch Steven with dinner prep at 4:30 tonight when, after following the communications lo...

Today I dropped Jordan off at summer camp. She will be gone for five nights. Five! It's the same camp I went to as a kid, and I loved it! The time away from home, meeting new friends, trying new things, it was always the highlight of my summer. In the spring I asked her if she still wanted to go to summer camp. Last year she pointed out to me a number of times that other kids she knew had gone to sleep-away camp, and not just to a day camp, so this spring I asked her if she still wanted to go to a sleep-away summer camp, and she jumped at it. I sent away her registration, and a few days later received a confirmation email. She excitedly chose her four activities for the week and was happy to hear that her cousin would be joining her. As it came closer, I could tell she was nervous. She mentioned a few times recently that she'd miss me. I told her that I'd miss her too, but that I was excited for her to try something new and fun. Today we packed up the campsite that...

I could be doing a multitude of things. Cleaning my room. Taking the kids on the bike ride they've been begging to go on. Clearing my island so it looks like an island instead of the start of what promises to be an impressive hoarder house. Instead I'm sitting here updating my facebook status 100 times, finally deciding I may as well just blog. It's time for my every-second-month post anyway. Jordan just left to go to a corn maze with a very good friend and her parents. It's strange having someone call here to snatch a kid for the day. It's stranger still to have my daughter have her own social life. Although I must say, that she does seem to gravitate towards very nice girls, and I hope she continues to seek out such friendships as she moves through her child/teenager years. Next year she'll be in middle school. It would be nicer to see her surround herself with niceness than bitchiness and drama. This morning I told her she should take a hoodie along, be...