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 ...

I used to blog more. Sometimes I go back and reread parts of my blog, and I think, this was fun! I'm glad I did this, I forget all these things otherwise! Not sure when exactly I became a non-blogger. I feel like maybe it was facebook, or getting my iPhone and texting people my little stories and random thoughts all day. Once I've told somebody something, it's "out there," and I don't feel the draw to come in here and write about it. Maybe I should just stop telling people things until after I've blogged. I didn't sleep much last night, probably because of all the coke in the paralyzers. After a night of tossing and turning and weird dreams, I finally just gave up on having a really good sleep at about 5:30. Then, all the coffee, and catching up on some blogs I read, and wondering why I essentially quit. Tennyson was up here at 6:30 and hopped on the other computer. Did you know that boys can't play computer games without becoming their own...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...