Christmas Love & Lights...

I love this shot of us from last night at Zoo Lights!  Photo credit goes to my lovely sister April.  It was a rather chilly outing (even with the chinook, long johns and wool socks) but I'm glad we did it.  The lights were delightful and the company charming, except for the little girl who kept complaining that she was "really, REALLY hungry!" ;)

My Halloween Rant

With Halloween here and gone I am still rather baffled about the big deal people make out of it.  We let the kids dress up and took them out trick or treating around our neighbourhood, and they each got a nice little bag of loot.  It was a mild evening for the end of October in Alberta, and it was actually a novelty to interact with our neighbours.  

One of the things that gets me is how some people are so up in arms about the Halloween candy.  Trading it in for cash at dentist clinics or having "Harvest Parties" with healthy snacks instead.  It's ONE holiday that is all about candy, and if it is eaten in moderation, I do not see the harm in it.  Our kids eat pick one treat after they've eaten their supper, and they are thrilled about it.  

The other thing that bothers me is that Halloween comes in second only to Christmas for consumer spending.  Honestly?!  That is crazy.  Our kids' costumes were mostly dress-up things they already had, we just bought felt to make Blaise a mask and Acadia a little crown to complete her fairy princess get-up.  We did buy some candy to hand out as well but only had about a dozen kids come to our door, so I ended up eating way too many mini mars bars!

Family Photo

We had our family photo taken in hopes of using it for our Christmas picture but Acadia was not feeling very photogenic that day (as you can see).  Oh well!  I'm thinking there is probably a rather small window of time when your children will smile nicely for a photo, after they're preschoolers and before they're teenagers.  But then again maybe it's the child's personality, who knows?

The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep

Blaise was making noise in his room when he was supposed to be asleep tonight. "Try counting sheep" I advised him. "Actually Mama I'm going to count turtles crossing a stream," he replied sagely. Whatever works my son, whatever works :)

First Day of Kindergarten (In Our Kitchen)

Here is Blaise with his very first kindergarten math/language project. Acadia did a modified one as well, as she wants to be involved of course. I was so excited to start home schooling Blaise today that I kept waking up in the night! He was excited too (or ex-kite-ed as he would say) thankfully. It went great except for one slight glitch when our song for the week about space "See You On the Moon" by the Great Lake Swimmers, wasn't fast enough for my little student to bust a move to. But he quickly recovered, and really my lesson was fail-proof since we used marshmallows to measure the height of the rocket he made :)

See How our Garden Grows!

Here are the kids with our tomato plants, the first shot was taken at the end of June and the second the end of July. It's always amazing to me how much they grow! The rewards of having the kids in on this is awesome too. When we were there last we spotted a little green tomato on one of the plants. Acadia was exclaiming "tomatoes aren't green!" so that was a great opportunity to explain how things ripen, and that food doesn't just come from a grocery store ;)

Adventures of a Container Gardener

I slyly picked this wild strawberry plant on my walk last night :) I'm curious to see if it will produce any fruit once I confine it to a pot. I don't have the greenest thumb around but I love plants and flowers in any shape or form.

These are my poor little sweet pea seedlings, and the state I found them in after coming home in a hailstorm. They actually fared better than I had imagined, with only one leaf down. I LOVE sweet peas but they always seem quite finicky to grow in pots, so I'll see if I get any lovely fragrant blooms from my plants this summer.

Tomorrow morning the kids and I are going to plant a row of carrots, beets, zucchini, tomatoes, and sunflowers at a friends house. Yippee! We planted a bunch of stuff from seed but they really need transplanting into the ground, especially the zucchini which I'm sure are going to crawl away on their own soon to find deeper soil ;)

My Little Boy Can READ!

(Blaise "reading" Brown Bear, Brown Bear when he was almost 3 at our house in Guate)

Yesterday I sat down with the kids and a "We Both Read" book from the library. It has a page for the parent to read on the left and then a child's page on the right. (Smart huh). So I thought I'd see if Blaise could sound out some of the words, only to discover he could read entire sentences! He read "Pets can be big. Pets can be small." from the kids page with zero prompting from me! I think the reason I'm so wonderstruck is that he pretty much taught himself to read. We have read to him since he was a baby, plus he sees Zaak and I read the paper/magazines/books all the time, and of course there are great kids programs on TV like SuperWhy. But I just love that is was a natural thing, we haven't been sitting him down every day to practice sounding out letters or anything, he just picked it up. Clever boy that he is :) And completely unbiased mother that I am ;)

(Blaise and Acadia reading a giant Dora book from Grandma :)

Goodbye Grandma.

My Grandma Reding had a stroke this past February and then passed away a few days later. I was in BC for her funeral on Valentines Day. It was the longest I've ever been away from my kids, and I ended up with a lot of alone time just thinking. Thinking about how much I miss my Grandma, and what she meant to me. We lived a stone's throw away from my grandparents when I was little and the closeness we enjoyed was so precious. I always felt bad the past few years that I couldn't get back to BC to see them more, but the visits we did have were lovely. Grandma was also a very faithful correspondent, so I love that I can look back at all the homemade cards she has sent me through the years and see her handwriting. These are some of my memories of her:

-Her favorite color was purple

-She was always quick to laugh and to love

-She made the best vegetarian patties

-She gave the best foot massages

-She made so many beautiful things; blankets, p.j.'s...Acadia and Blaise's blankets on their beds that they sleep with every night. I still have a small blue and red afghan she made for me when I was little.

-She was an amazing story-teller.

-She was a faithful letter writer, sending me her hand made cards even when we were in Guatemala.

-When we were kids we'd come into her house after playing in the snow and she'd make us sweet mint tea.

-Playing with the big tin of mismatched buttons at her house.

-Picking raspberries and the huge vegetable garden we'd help with every summer.

-Calling Blaise "their little Robbie"

-Escaping the CUC cafeteria for a good home cooked meal.

-Spending every Christmas Eve at her house with all my raucous cousins.

15 Years Ago Today

It's been 15 years since my dad died in a car accident. I've spent almost as much time without him now as with him, since I was 16 when it happened. It's hard to say what I feel exactly...it's definitely not the hollow sick feeling it used to be, thankfully. It's just that I'm not that 16 year old girl who had just failed her learners test anymore. I'm an adult now and I wish I had an adult relationship with my dad. I wish he could meet my husband and kids. I have lots of questions I'd like to ask him. It still hurts that he's gone. I guess it always will.