Stuff I Waste Time On!

Here's a bunch of my favorite blogs:

http://www.lovelylisting.com/

Lovely Listing has all sorts of interesting/creepy/weird/eye bleed inducingly ugly photos from real estate listings. People have some weeeeeeeeird houses. Like this one:





Yep, that's an aquarium floor. I'm pretty sure this is James' dream home. Well, we ARE saving up our downpayment right now...quick, what's 5% of 29 million?













And then there's Cake Wrecks:

http://www.cakewrecks.com/

Like cakes with obvious spelling errors? Cakes with instructions like "I want sprinkles" written out? Cakes with random, unexplained piles of dog poo icing? Cake Wrecks is the place to go. One of my personal favorites:








Now really, how could you NOT have a happle birthday with a cake like this? Man, I can't wait until I'm fithy years. plus Nine...that's gonna be awesome.





This next one comes with an assignment:

http://www.awkwardfamilyphotos.com/

No picture, but see if you can find the one of the nude couple posing with their very annoyed looking cats. Don't worry, the cats are covering all of the essentials...I want the back story on that one, bad.

And a couple for the members reading:

http://www.whatmormonslike.blogspot.com/

This guy hasn't updated for awhile, but this blog is well worth a read through...hee-larious!

http://www.overheardintheward.com/

Lots of funny stuff heard at church - not surprisingly a good chunk of it comes from sunbeam classes. This one's my favorite:

Mom: How was Primary today?
Son: Good.
Mom: What did you do?
Son: Well, they told us Jesus was coming but he never showed up… so we just colored.

And finally...

http://www.sexypeople-blog.com/

I'm not brave enough to scan my grade 7 picture, but believe me, they'd post it.

My Office has "Es-ploded"

It's been teething hell-week for poor Mr. Seth...he's cut 3 top teeth in the last 7 days, and #4 isn't far behind. Little man and I were up at 4am this morning, so I thought I would get some much needed paperwork done while he was distracted with his "baby genius" DVD and we waited for the baby Tylenol to kick in.

About an hour later, piles of various papers all around me, I gave up. Half the stuff I needed was buried who knows where. I'm normally an organized person - I seem to do well everywhere else in the house but papers just pile up like crazy. For the past year or so whenever I'd have to hunt for something I would swear up and down that I was going to straighten this mess out Once. And. For. All. Then I'd find what I needed, and that plan promptly went out the window.

No more...I'm gonna get me wunna them there offices in a box today, and then the Great Office Organziation of '09 is ON. Seems like the only solution now that my desk file drawer only opens half way and my hanging file folders have literally fallen apart. It's like an ancient ruin of what was once a great filing system, pre-children. Now Emmett plays mailman with said broken drawer (if James or I ask the other if we've seen some small item, the first reply is usually "check the mailbox"...and at least half the time, we're right) and one of the Seth's favorite pasttimes is tipping over my office garbage can and diving head first into the balled up paper and candy wrappers.

The real heart of the problem is we have just plain run out of space. We live in a basement apartment, which by anyone's basement apartment standards is pretty nice and very liveable, but even as a rather minimalist family of 4 we are really crammed in here. Our christmas decorations live in the boys' closet, along with kid clothes of every season and size (properly boxed and labelled...go me!). James' tools are hanging out in the pantry. My griddle is hanging off a coat hanger on a pipe in the laundry room. My mother in law gave us their wok yesterday and I honestly haven't the faintest idea of where it's going to live.

A basement, a basement, my kindgom for a basement! (That we, uh, don't have to live in too.) Hopefully we'll be buying our first place next spring/summer...then my office in a box can get to know its friends Christmas Tree and 0-3 month Boy's Sleepers better in a cozy dark little corner far away from my line of sight. ;)

I want chicken, I want liver...or maybe just some tofurkey.

I caught a bit of The View today as I was folding Mt. Washmore (aka a long weekend's worth of laundry for a family of 4) - Alicia Silverstone was on promoting some new vegan diet book she's putting out. She spoke about how "nasty" foods like meat and dairy are "unkind" and make you feel bad. Ok, I can be on board with that...downing tons of meat and dairy probably isn't the best for you. There is definitely something to be said for a (mostly) plant based diet, and if someone feels the need to be vegetarian or vegan, I can totally respect that. I could go veggie, but avoiding anywhere that bacon was being fried up would be tantamount to my success. I don't think I could handle vegan (if my life had a subtitle it would be "A Life Without Cheese isn't a Life Worth Living"), but to each their own, right?

But you know what part really stuck with me? Alicia Silverstone's DOG is vegan too. The thought of a vegan dog manages to both amuse and annoy me simulateously. Some argue that humans aren't meant to consume animal products, and while I don't agree, I can accept that argument. But dogs? What exactly does Ms. Silverstone think her dog would be eating if left to its own devices? Perhaps she imagines it would hit Trader Joe's and Whole Foods begging for kelp "meat"balls (kelpballs?) like that scene in Lady and the Tramp. Come on...has Hollywood really reached the point that even naturally carnivorus animals can't enjoy a little Iams the way nature intended?

As The View's co-hosts ooh and aahed over the guacamole (vegan cheese and sour cream, natch) and aformentioned kelpballs, one mentioned her sister and five kids...where were they to find the super special calcium rich seaweed used in the kelpball dish? "Oh", Alicia replied "you could order it online, or just pick it up at (insert overpriced specialty hippie store of your choosing here)." Yep, I can just see it now...Joe Six Pack driving right on past Wal-Mart to the local hipster hangout to pick up the kids' favorite vegan cheese-whiz. It's just not dinner without it, you know?

It's a personal pet peeve of mine to see celebs hawking the latest "miracle diet" calling for weird, inexpensive, hard to find ingredients and insisting that evvvvvvvvvvvvvvverybody would just feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel so much better it they only tried it! Tell that to the majority of people out there whose monthly grocery budget would be busted after one trip to the store.

/End Rant

On a completely unrelated subject, Em had his first trip to the dentist today...we've been reading Just Going to the Dentist (Oh how I love Mercer Mayer!!) all week and talking about how the dentist was going to look at his teeth with a mirror on a stick, which he seemed to think was moderately cool. Still, Emmett is Emmett, and things went about as well as could be expected. The dentist said Emmett was the first kid he's ever seen that could cry and scream with his mouth closed...LOL, classic Em! The new dental hygenist there also spoke and acted exactly like Kelly from The Office, which was highly amusing. She was great though, super gentle. Hopefully Em's a little more cooperative next year, otherwise we may have to talk alternative measures - maybe The Big Book of British Smiles and then "hold still while I gas you!!" ;)

Nerdy Confession

I love indexing! There, I said it. Whew! ;)

For those thoroughly confused right now, indexing is when you take images of old records (censuses, birth/marriage/death certificates, ship passenger lists, etc) and type out the info so that it can be searched by those doing their family history. Before indexing you would have to get rolls of microfiche and scroll through them until your eyes felt like they were going to fall out of your head, and hope you found the information you were looking for. (Yeah, I did that exactly once.) After something is indexed you should be able to type in a name, for example, have it pop right up for you.

I started indexing last year after reading an article about it in our church magazine (Mormons are well known for being genealogy-happy) and checking out the website. As of today, I've indexed 10,659 names! It's probably more than that, because I've done quite a few records that had more than one name on it (like a marriage record that's got the bride and groom as well as their parents' info). A couple of weeks ago I got an email from the site inviting me to be an arbitrator...each record is indexed by 2 different people, and the arbitrator goes through any discrepancies and picks the correct information. I have to admit, my inner nerd was pretty stoked to be given arbitrator status. So far I've arbitrated 150 records...sometimes it's really hard to figure out which interpretation of the info is correct, but I'm doing my best with it.

It's pretty interesting to read the old records and learn a bit about the past. The death records make me glad I live in the 21st century...even 70 or 80 years ago people died of seemingly benign things ALL the time. The romantic in me wonders if the people who filled out those 100 year old marriage certificates stayed together all of their lives. It surprised me as well to see the number of women in their late 30's and up getting married for the first time...I always thought back in the day you were a confirmed spinster by the age of 23! I've seen plenty of interesting names - one 19th century black family in the deep south gave all of their sons occupation names: Doctor, Judge, etc. Sometimes I even Wiki the places on the records...I did a bunch of death records for what turned out to be a TB hospital somewhere in the southern states. I looked it up and found a picture of the place - it was pretty much the creepiest looking building ever.

So yeah, I may not be doing *my* family history (kind of at an impasse on that one right now) but at least I'm helping others do theirs...and satisfying my inner nerdiness at the same time. Win win!

Another quick preschool update...I hosted for our co-op preschool for the first time today! We learned about Thanksgiving - we ran around pretending to be turkeys and made a turkey centerpiece out of a lunch bag and some construction paper. Emmett still wasn't sure about things, even though we were hosting this week - I think the word "preschool" still has negative connotations for him. He freaked out while we were pretending to be turkeys, which didn't surprise me (he is really weird about pretending to be animals), but I'm trying to teach him that we do a variety of stuff at preschool so there is something for everyone and it's not just things HE wants to do all the time. He actually did most of his turkey craft, which pleasantly surprised me, and he did a fantastic job sharing his toys with the other kids. Oh, and he went nutso for the animal crackers we had for snack, surprise surprise. ;) All in all a successful morning!

Preschool Update

So it seems it's all's well that ends well with this preschool business. I talked to the director via email a couple of times about my concerns, but she was pretty much all "We're awesome, what are you talking about?" Yeah. Long story short I got my money back and I never have to set foot in that place again.

On a much more positive note, I am now doing both homeschool preschool with Emmett, as well as a preschool co-op with some friends from church once a week! We'll all take turns teaching, and it will be Emmett and 4 other boys, all pretty close in age. We had a planning meeting this week and I'm really excited about it...these ladies are all fantastic and I love all the little boys that will be in his "class". I think we're going to have a lot of fun!

I'm doing the homeschool thing Monday thru Friday, just for about 10 minutes a day. We're doing things like colours, letters, numbers, nursery rhymes, etc. He pretty well knows all of that stuff, but it's more about having him practice school skills. He really needs to work on his listening (What 3 year old doesn't, right?), and I'm just now introducing crafts to him - definitely his LEAST favorite part of "preschool"! Each week we're doing a theme based on stuff he's interested in - last week was cows and this week we're learning about bees. He's becoming quite the little expert on beehives and honey! On Friday we're going to make a bee that he can play with, so maybe that kind of craft will interest him a little more.

As terrible as this whole preschool experience has been, I think it really increased my confidence as a mom and reminded me how much I've grown as a mother in the past few years. I was updating Seth's baby book this morning and I pulled out Emmett's for comparison. Seth is just starting to crawl, but Emmett was still a couple of months away from crawling (and 4 lbs heavier!) at this point, and I remember being super worried about it. I also remember people telling me it was no big deal, that he would get there, but until he did I couldn't stop myself from worrying. Of course with Seth being my second I'm way more laid back in that area, but even with Emmett I'm loosening up. Emmett has always been behind his peers on most things developmentally. He's proven that it's not a matter of intelligence (this kid has all of his books memorized and practically operates the computer better than me), but a matter of only working on things that are important to Emmett. Singing and reading and computer games are important to Emmett. Taking his own shoes off or using the potty...not so much. It can be frustrating at times, but I KNOW he's going to get there. I'm doing what I can to help him stretch out of his comfort zone and try new things, and I'm not sweating the rest. I can't tell you how much I wish I could go back about 2 years in time and tell myself to chill out. ;)

Alarm Bells

As I mentioned in my last entry, Emmett started preschool last week. After the second day I got pulled in for a "chat" about Em's lack of listening skills and short attention span. This behavior "couldn't go on all year". I was asked to observe the next class to see if I had some suggestions for them.

I spend the whole day crying off and on, thinking I had somehow failed as a parent because my child wasn't falling in line at preschool. I was afraid he was going get kicked out of the program. I spoke to trusted friends and family about it over the weekend and went in there on Tuesday resolved to help my child adjust to preschool and support the teachers any way I could.

As I brought Em into the classroom, he started bawling, which surprised me since he had been fine the first couple of days. Alarm bells started going off in my head when I was consoling him in my lap and one of the teachers came up to him and said (well, more like yelled): "Come on Emmett, there are only 12 minutes left of play time and you CAN'T stay on your mom's lap, you need to get down here and PLAY."

I reacted slowly...things just kept going from bad to worse and something inside me was screaming "Something is NOT right about this". The pinnacle moment came when Emmett refused to draw something on the daily art project and the teacher grabbed his head and forced him to look at the paper while holding his arm and forcing him to draw. I don't know why I didn't slap this woman, I think I was in shock. I could NOT believe was I was seeing.

During this time one other child was crying for his mother - he was shown no compassion whatsoever, was told "You are in SCHOOL now and you should know better than to keep crying!"and was basically just put in a corner to cry. My mom suggested I go back to the school and find this boy's parents and tell them what happened. That's what I did this morning and I am SO glad that I did...alarm bells had been going off for them as well but what I told them convinced them not to put their kid back in that class. The boy's grandmother told me that when they went to pick him up on Tuesday, the teacher said "Oh, is he still in the bathroom?"

They had put him in the bathroom, closed the door and forgot about him. Him mom found him sobbing on the floor. Apparently this child's mother and grandmother also saw Emmett sobbing in a corner on the first day, and they thought it wasn't right.

I can't believe anyone would possibly think treating a child like that is acceptable. I've written a letter to the preschool director letting her know my concerns (and believe me, showing professionalism and restraint while writing it was no easy task) and Emmett will never set foot in that place again.

This was my first experience with the "mommy alarm bells" going off, and needing to advocate for my child. I am so grateful that I was in that class to witness what was going on and that I listened to my gut on this one.

Summer Update

It's 4am and I can't sleep, so I might as well check "finally write another blog entry" off my to do list and post a bunch of pictures I've been holding onto for the last couple of months.

We went to Jasper for Canada day...the weather wasn't fantastic but the boys proved to be excellent little travellers and we made the best of it. We had a picnic beside Lake Annette and Emmett was way too busy throwing rocks in the lake to actually eat!

There's a paved trail around the lake so we were able to take Em and Seth for a little hike after lunch...Emmett walked most of the 2.4 km, which I thought was pretty impressive for someone who's legs are only 10 inches long or so. ;)

A rare shot of James - he's almost always behind the camera!

Then the kids figured, hey we drove 4 hours to get here...let's hang out in the car some more!

Em and daddy by the Jasper bear - it's amazing how much these two look alike, their builds are identical!

One of the stores in town had a bubble machine...he was SO MAD when we had to leave it behind!

Not sure why James took this one, probably because he's pinching himself while sleeping...kids are weird.

I turned 28 on the August long weekend...getting older isn't really as fun when you're closer to 30 than 20! I decided to make my own birthday dinner - I saw these french bread mushroom pizzas on Rachael Ray's show years ago, and they looked SO good, but the ingredients were way too expensive to justify making it for a regular dinner. This year I decided I was finally going to make them...they were really good! I turned it into kind of an italian theme with caprese salad and grilled asparagus.

James cleaned the kitchen after, which was also my present. ;)

Emmett started preschool last week...he was very excited to wear his little backpack and seems to be really enjoying it! Here he is on the first day:

He's having a little trouble adjusting to the structured environment of preschool, but hopefully we'll be able to work with him on that in the coming weeks.

We just got back from Lethbridge this weekend - we visited James' Oma and Opa, and hit the Calgary Zoo on the way down as well. (I don't have pics of this yet, as they're on James' phone) It's funny what is important to little folks...we worked hard to get Emmett to notice all of the exotic animals, but he was more excited by things like the flowers and a bunch of sparrows hanging out in the porcupine enclosure. He did really enjoy the giraffes and the monkeys though.
The boys did very well camping and visiting Oma and Opa...it was a lot of time in small spaces not really designed for children and they handled it quite well. (We were hoping to spend some time outdoors but it was wasp central...I got bit myself under my arm, not fun.) The boys were the hit of the assisted living centre where Oma and Opa live - Seth was in full charm mode and Emmett had a great time running around and saying hi to all the residents. Opa even arranged for Emmett to have yogurt for dessert at dinner time...yogurt is his favorite food and he was SO excited! Now that he's talking more it's so fun to get his "take" on things...we got a lot of "Wow!" and "It's so BEAUTIFUL!" this weekend. (The camper was especially "beautiful" ;))

Sethers sure changed a lot this summer...he's sitting up really well now, and is on the verge of crawling. He's adapted a really cute system to get around - a combination of rolling and hand over hand wriggling that looks like he's swimming! He's babbling constantly and we think he's starting to mimic words - this weekend he was saying "oooooooooopa, oooooooooooooopa" a lot. (Probably because big brother was saying Hey Opa, Hi Opa, Opa up, etc constantly the whole trip)

A few random pics:

This is what happens when you go on a formula bender:

The tiger and the hawaiian tourist:

So that was our summer...it was fun but I'm glad it's over - bring on the colder temperatures please! (Note: I reserve the right to take this back in February!)