tiffany's spot

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, ...

It took me close to two hours to prime my dining room ceiling. Dusting/Priming/Painting the ceiling is the most hateful job in the world . I'm not even kidding. I don't know how people do it without turning to alcohol. Anyway. See the little black spots? Those are holes. My little pot lights are going to go in there. It's now 2:50. At this point I'm starting to reconsider my original plan to "quickly prime the dining room after lunch and then carry on about my day." Chances are fairly good that I'll have to pick up  my kids from school at some point, and likely this will still not be done. Also, we settled on green. Actually, I picked out 48 green choices to ponder, Steven came by, threw out about half of them, told me to just pick something already, since they were all the same colour, waited until I narrowed it down to about four choices and selected one. And then today I went to the paint store and picked the one I really wanted. Sorry honey...

Our poor little old dining room has come a long way. Previous home owners thought it would be a great idea to increase living space by simply adding a few walls, some really cheap single pane windows, a roof and a whole lot of paneling to the old deck and call it a dining room. We kind of ignored the crappiness of it. The extra space was really nice, but the freezing cold floors in teh winter, and the wind that blew through here in January (and all year, but January really seems to stand out. Strange eh?), and the slant that slowly grew slantier eventually made some upgrades necessary. Did I mention that the whole room was held up by four 2x6 beams sitting on patio blocks? Or that one of those beams didn't even actually reach the patio block it was supposed to sit on? Did I tell you about the time that the room shifted so much over a couple of days that I went to let the dog out in the morning and then couldn't shut the door because suddenly the door knob didn't mat...

Hey Tennyson, do you need that overflow?

Today we celebrated Brooks and Riley's birthdays. They have a combined age of 51. I know, they look fantastic. Also, they refused to both look and smile handsomely at the camera at the same time. And when they finally did, it became apparent that I should probably stop taking pictures with my iphone in drkened rooms, especially of small moving people. Regardless. It was fun. And this was not me taking a picture of my toddler, drinking a giant pop, in a bar. Happy Birthday Brooks and Riley!!

Tonight at the nursery school swim party fundraiser (I'm sure that was the actual name. The fliers were rolled scrolls that were sent home with all the parents) I was talking to another woman who runs sometimes. I actually think the conversation started with where to buy nice shapely sports bras and ended with something like "Oh yeah, I run outside all the time, it's super fun and nobody who is a runner would ever consider bitching about winter, and all you really need is running shoes, and it's not even slippery and seriously, you're a total jerk for not running outside." And I was all like, well shit, if she can do it I can probably maybe consider doing it. Then I got home and the weather was beautiful and I wondered just how slippery the streets really were. Steven was a few minutes behind me in his truck, and I was in the driveway with a van load of kids who should have been in bed an hour or so earlier, but why wouldn't I run to the stop sign and...

Another high-quality iPhone picture! Did you see what I did in that picture? I know. Hilarious. Jordan and I spent the night "sleeping" in the Science Gallery (apparently we don't call it Touch the Universe anymore) with a hundred other "sleeping" girls from three different Girl Guide groups. It was awesome - the museum part, not so much sleeping on the floor with a million other people, but the museum's sleepover program is fantastic. Each group was given an itinerary and a museum guide and had numerous stops to make. We watched a really good planetarium show, we sat in the auditorium and listened to a story teller (I loved this part), we toured the museum and spent a lot of time with a real live mummy (even if some of the littler kids freaked out when watching a video where the mummy turned all mushy and then skeletal, resulting in the kids having to go colour pictures in an area where they couldn't see the mummy, but where other tvs would sti...