Elisa’s Day

hey, an update !! man, the ol’ blog updates a few and far between in the summer. i know it’s mostly because the few blogs i read are mostly “local” and people i know in real life, and the real life truth is, us crazy canadians are out sucking up as much nice weather as we can because we all know that at least 6 months of shit weather is just around the corner.

not much going on around here. well not much that seems eventful or worthy of mentioning really. just the same old routine……ashley already said it. garden.feed kids.laundry.more gardening.get your own snack please.knitting.chickens.chase baby.more laundry.no fighting.clean.give up on cleaning. more garden.chickens.baking.as always laundry.knitting.baby what are you eating off the floor?stop fighting.garden.etc.

other then that, not much. every saturday we go to the farmers market and meet up with friends. all the kids run around the park and all the parents drink fair trade coffee and eat delicious home made treats the fair trade coffee lady makes. there’s been the odd play date. and everyone under 5 feet tall saw the dentist yesterday and sees the eye doctor next week.

yesterday we re-arranged the girls bedroom. we’re having some sleep issues right now. with two bedrooms and four kids. one of whom is not yet sleeping through the night on any kind of regular basis. so for a while now we’ve had molly in a room by herself and the three older girls in the other room ( they are huge rooms ) but much hi-jinx was ensuing after bed time. which doesn’t matter much now, but in a few short weeks, when we’re back to 6 am wake ups it’s going to be a problem. so first we tried olivia in the babies room, which she wanted to try. but it involved waiting until molly was asleep, then sneaking in. and then molly started getting up more in the night. which may or may not be related i guess, but last night with her room back to herself she slept through so…….but then i had to remove the instigator. which is, duh, hannah. if you know 3 yr olds, you know hannah is the instigator. so we have this crazy “hallway” between the two bedrooms. it’s really something else. a sitting room, or something. it’s too big to be a hallway. it’s where my MIL sleeps when she’s here. it has a huge dresser and a day bed in it. as well as this big recessed area with built in shelving where i keep all the kids books and some toy overflow. so yesterday i put hannah’s little toddler bed in there. which ryan and i have been jokingly referring to as “the hole” in all my theoretical plans for this sleeping arrangement. so now hannah is “doing time in the hole” hee hee. i mean, her bed fits perfectly with just enough room to walk beside it, and if it works out, i’ll paint it and let her put all her stuff on the shelves. and that will be hannah’s space until molly is ready for a room mate. which i predict to be 6-8 months from now. not ideal, but hey, what can you do.

we also hit the big thrift store in hopes of finding a bookshelf or something for the girls room yesterday, which i did not find. but found quite a few good dresses for miss hannah who wants to only wear dresses. and this is the one downfall of hand me downs. if your “thing” doesn’t mesh with your big sisters “thing” when she was that size then you’re kind of screwed. and then the cashier let me know that today was a big half off furniture sale and they would be opening up the back area ( this location is a sorting station, so it’s 80% warehouse to it’s 20% retail space ) so while i write this i must remember that we have to be dressed and out the door by 8:45 to get there for opening. and speaking of thrift stores ( of which i am queen btw, i can spot a quality garment from 20 paces no matter how much crap it’s crammed onto the rack with ) there is a CRAZY on where my dad lives. one day while the girls were in their art class hannah and molly and i checked it out. and once i learned that the pricing structure is as follows “unless otherwise marked, shirts are 25c and pants are 50c”…..well…….i cleaned them out of every decent thing in any size my girls are or could wear ( gap,old navy, childrens place….some like brand new, hello cottage country…..i guess if you own a half a millon dollar cottage you don’t wear through your clothes so much ) it was ridiculous !! i told me dad i was running into town to hit that place every single time we visit now. i saw a women on tv who tried to not buy anything new for a whole year. i have been thinking about this a lot lately and wondering if i could pull that off. anyway…….

we’re back up there in a week and a half for the pottery class too. i am kind of in denial about having to pack again for another week away. though i did leave a lot of stuff up there, anything i could manage without.

okay, must get moving, it’s 7:45, and getting everyone ready and out of the house takes about an hour best case scenario.

lets just see if i can bang out an update while the kids are playing outside and the baby is sleeping. that’s right……playing outside because it is beautiful and spring like out there. it’s going outside with no hat and mitts weather out there. it’s the sun actually feels warm weather out there. it’s a beautiful thing. i mean sure, the kids play outside in the winter too. but there is only so much fun to be had with the mobility of the michelin tire man. and it’s always a race against the clock, how long can you play before your numb fingers, toes and nose force you back inside? on a good day it might be 45 min, but more often then not it’s about 20 minutes. so it is a happy day when i can kick the kids outside sans hats and mitts and they’ll stay out there a good hour or so.

last week was a crazy one. i was on the go all week. which means my house is trashed in a serious way. i can generally keep on top of the mess (to a reasonable extent anyway) but if too many other plans start creeping into the picture, well, something has to give. so mess was left. laundry was not done. it all spirals out of control pretty quickly believe me. so today was spent cleaning. though sadly, not much laundry has been done yet, but i still have the afternoon.

and now i hear my baby crying, so off i go to get her, feed her etc. and will have to finish this later

okay, two hours later. baby is playing on the floor with the kids. roast is in the oven. ryan made our very first successful pie for dessert. we have both tried pie crust before and it always ended badly. but he did it !! yay. also the house is reasonably clean again and we even made bread. a productive day.

yesterday we spent the day in peterborough shopping. my grandma was nice enough to escort us to costco ( membership required ) and we even got to leave the kids with my cousins so we could shop in peace. i have had to start shopping at costco. it’s kind of annoying to drive to peterborough to do it, but the kids are getting bigger, they eat a lot and there is still one more to add to the collective appetite. imagine you buy on bunch of banana’s and then you doll them out three ( soon to be four ) at a time ( let alone if you want one ) well, one bunch doesn’t go too far. i need the giant bag of grapefruit. the giant bag of oranges. the huge box of granola. the 44 pounds of flour. the six pack of whole wheat spaghetti, because everyone here loves spaghetti and one box of noodles is barely enough. if we want leftovers i need to make a box and a half. you get the point. ryan says our basement is starting to look like a bomb shelter with all the overflow storage in addition to the home canned goods. what i really need now is a second fridge for the basement. ryan has a little bar fridge down there that is packed, but i’m going to start watching the classifieds for one. and i definitely can’t wait to get some new egg layers in the spring. ( or sooner ) we go through 2-3 dozen eggs a week. we’re also getting a freezer pack of local beef from a guy up the road to go in the deep freeze with our chickens this year.

not much else going on. another round of swimming lessons over with. and a few extra weeks in between this time, as the pool closes for some much needed renovations.

other then that, march break, no real plans, but we’ll head up to my dad’s for a few days just to get out of the house. i’m working on ryan’s sweater. it’s coming slowly, but coming along all the same. i finally got around to reading the Lost Symbol. it was fine. a more formulistic writer there may not be, but entertaining all the same. then my mom brought over Year of the Flood. i’m just trying to decide of i should read Oryx and Crake again first. i also have a few easy patterns and some fabric i picked up for next to nothing at our fabricland, soon to be closed. i’ll give sewing another try and see how it goes. i’d like to be able to make things for the girls.

and there you have it, the mundane minutiae of my life, but now my baby wants me and i need to switch the laundry.

i have decided to put off my attempts at learning to crochet ( again ) until after christmas. only because i have several gifts i want to make, and it makes sense to stick with what i already have a (semi)-grasp of. so i have a few different knitting projects on the go already. all fairly simple of course, next year if i want to get more complicated i better start in august. i am working with my first pattern, up until now it’s been scarves and blankets, straight knit, knit, knit. it’s a simple pattern, but a pattern all the same, and it’s coming nicely. i’m excited to be making gifts for people, it really is satisfying.

i was also thinking of possibly using one of those book printing sites to make up books of photos for the grandparents, has anyone used one of these? it seems like a bit of a daunting task the more i think about it, only because i can’t do it from here, being as we’re all hooked up to the world wide web like it’s 1994 and everything. i would have to take photo’s on a disk to a friends house and work the whole project there high speed style. and i have no ideas what kind of time i’m looking at as far as doing all the photo editing and layout stuff.

i gave in to my inner hipster yoga mom and bought molly sophie the other day. though i paid slightly less then that at our local fancy baby store, it was still a pricey chew toy. but since i have not bought a single thing for miss molly, aside from one new sleeper to come home in, i figured, what the hell.  i have to tell you, sophie recieved at least 20$ worth of love the very first day. babies really do love to chew sophie’s nuby little head. go figure.

today is an olivia home day, so also her little friend. i’ll be packing everyone up and we’re off to the early years center. finally. we had to skip last week since sidney was all fluey. she survived btw. quite nicely. she wasn’t even that sick. i mean, i don’t know for sure it was The Big Scary Flu of course, but considering it’s rampant around here, it’s a safe bet. and surprise surprise, it wasn’t Big or Scary, it was just the flu. and people are STILL asking if we’ll be getting the shot. even after we’ve all been exposed to it? really? gah.

the early years center has started the pizza lunch wednesdays again, so i think we’ll be taking advantage of that today too. then when we get home hannah and molly ( hopefully) can go right to bed and the girls can go off an play and i can get some knitting done

our day in the city started off with a meeting, which we ended up being early for. you never know what kind of traffic/construction/other time delaying nightmare you might run into, so always better to be early right? of course nothing on hipster queen street west opens before 10 or 11, so unfortunately our only option worth taking was the kind of swanky looking crepe place. some delicious cinnamon sugar crepes with strawberries and a hot chocolate is a great way to kill some time. then a successful meeting, and one more loose end tied up……nice. it’s been a long year. really. a loooong year. but it seems like now finally, all these loose ends are getting tied up all at once. it’s a bigger relief then i could have imagined.

then we headed off to spend some time with the lovely and talented bill baker. an afternoon spent with bill never disappoints. there are few people who’s company i enjoy more, and “interesting” can’t even touch the surface of that guy, for real. we had a great lunch in the market and then while ryan was getting tattooed i wandered around china town looking for some unique little thing to bring home for the girls. then back to chill at bills studio with some fresh cherries from the market, and put my poor feet up for a bit. the only thing i miss almost as much as the food, the ability to buy fresh fruit, house plants, baked goods, a mop and any other random thing you might need from practically every corner

after we wound down our afternoon with bill we headed off to meet up with some of our oldest friends, carrie and jason, for dinner. so great. don’t get to see them enough for sure. and of course some sweet thai food. nice.

all in all a lovely trip to the city. a lovely day away from the kids too i might add. been awhile since we had that. of course by the time i got home, not just my ankles, but the tops of my feet were actually swollen……yikes. but by morning they were (almost) regular sized again.

a long week of millions of things to do stretching out ahead of me again  ( and therefor a lot of early mornings driving ryan to work as well )…….i just want to sit around doing nothing, honestly, but hey, such is life

saturday. i just want to get through saturday. then i can have this baby any time please.

well, another cold and icy week behind us. the one day it went above zero, it rained and rained and rained. and then the temperature dropped 10 degrees and we now live on the ice planet ( we actually have one corner in the back that is so crazy flooded, ryan is going to try skating on it tomorrow ).

today olivia skipped her swimming lesson to go to a birthday party. and i cleared my afternoon to stay with her, as i would have with sidney at that age. but olivia is no sidney. she gave me a quick “bye mom” at the door without even a backward glance and off she went. so i stayed for a bit to talk with the mom i’d never met, and then once i felt assured there was adequate supervision and it wasn’t a meth lab or bordello or any other unsavory environment, off i went to run some errands.

mostly i wandered around zellers not spending money. but it was quiet and no one talked incessantly in my ear, argued, or wandered off, while i spent a good half an hour in the yarn section, so that was nice. in the end i picked up an irresistible violet, nubbily, super duper soft, baby yarn ( also white as per the patter on the label ) it was a crochet pattern marked easy. but after consult with my mom, who crocheted a few lines ( is that the right term? ) it was determined that type of textured yarn, not a good one to use your very first time crocheting. so i’m going to knit it. now i just have to decide if i’ll keep the white and try and knit two colours, or return the white for purple and just knit it all one. or keep one white and my mom said she’d crochet an edge for me when i was done. or keep both white and knit squares or long pieces and then stitch them together. obviously the easiest solution is to just knit it all one colour. which i could start now and do on my own. but eventually i’m going to have to learn to do something other then knit rectangles.

i also treated myself to a bag of goodies. which i didn’t notice until i was home tonight and opened them, were “new and improved” even “goodier” read the bag. but really they are suckier. they are bigger and the candy coating seems kind of craptastic. what was wrong with the old goodies? so sad.

and now, i have about an hour or more of laundry folding to do. i can never decide which is worse. doing a bit of laundry every day or doing it all at once. but the kids laundry alone has hit 4 big and crammed full baskets a week at least. and i generally do it all at once, like today, i find it makes the sorting easier. hopefully there is something mildly amusing on tv to pass the folding time.

it was a dark and stormy day, but with the older girls both off at school, ryan decided we needed to get out of the house for a little road trip. he found a farm that mills their own organic flour, and although it isn’t super close, it’s close enough, so after a few failed attempts to call and email them for info, we were told by another customer that just dropping by the farm is the best bet. so we decided to take our chances and headed out to peterborough, which is about 40 min. away and a much bigger town then we live in, for a bit of shopping.

the first stop was value village, a great place all around, but the BEST place for kids books. how wrong can you go with a huge selection of books for 1$ each, and as if that wasn’t good enough, it’s buy 4 get one free. nice. then a quick stop by aunt erin’s new place of employment, a used dvd/video game store, where we traded a couple bags of crappy movies bought in what could only be described as moments of clearly bad judgement and sitting in our basement wasting space, for some lovely cash. then off to the evil store that starts with “W ” for new rain boots for little girls, they practically had to swim to school today and there was some complaining of pinching toes in last years rain boots ( and new socks for the littlest girl, who will never need a pair of rain boots in her life as i’m pretty sure i have a pair in every size now and you just can’t wear those things out ) i’ve told ryan i really need a shelving unit in the basement just dedicated all the kids shoes and boots i have, so i could put them out by size so that i know what i have for who in what size for each season. it’s becoming a daunting collection all tossed into rubbermaid tubs to be dug through whenever the seasons turn.

then off to find the farm. which we did, and bought ourselves a big ass bag of organic flour ( 50 pounds i think ) all in all a successful trip.

and now a short half an hour until the new survivor, which i am excited about, as always.

seems like i have had a trip into to town every day for the last 5 or 6…….but after chugging half a coffee this morning and running out the door as early as possible to beat the crowds, i believe i am now done !

quick trip to the mall for a few last minute things, doctors appointment, few more last minute things downtown, the dairy barn ( the local dairy here has a little drive through spot called the dairy barn )  and groceries. now my goal is to just relax, enjoy the holidays and not leave the house for 5 days. yay.

tomorrow my sister, aunt, cousins and grandma will all be coming to my mom’s for christmas eve festivities and homemade pizza, and for the first time i don’t have to leave super early to put the kids to bed……i can run next door, put them to bed and be right back…..nice……then it’s just christmas day and relaxing for a couple days until we venture off to ryan’s mom’s in ottawa on the 28th.

if my overall goal is to not leave the house for 5 days, then my mini goal is to get the house picked up and back into shape today, and start wading through the mountain of laundry, before company starts descending tomorrow. because right now it is a sad disaster. it seems i can not stay on top of it these days ( that applies to both laundry and the house cleaning ) so we’ll see how far i actually get today. one of these days i’d like to figure out just how many hours a week i spend doing laundry, including sorting, folding and putting away of course, because everyone knows the actual throwing it in the machine is the easy part. then again, maybe i don’t want to really know.

i hope everyone has a great and safe holiday !!

well, december is finally upon us. we have spent the weekend picking away at the decorations. i guess i have a lot of decorations. i don’t know. i don’t feel like it’s tons compared to….say…..my mother. but compared to most people, i guess it’s a lot. so i have to give myself several days to get it done, a bit at a time. so far i’ve gotten all the garlands decorated, and little bits and pieces put out. the kids decorated their tree ( i am more then slightly compulsive about my perfectly decorated, red and silver tree, with many, one of a kind, sentimental decorations, and hey, i know that’s no fun for kids, so they also get their own small tree with blinking multicoloured lights and their very own decorations )  and i am enjoying unpacking everything even more as they years go by.

i have been collecting some of this stuff for a long time. as is evident by the bag all the strings of beads were in,  from the good old superfresh mart. that’s a “corner store” that was across from one of our apartments in toronto. you know, one of those awesome city corner stores. that is really a small grocery, convenience store, deli and farmers market all in one. that bag is from some time in the late 90’s. ryan and i had a good laugh last night when i pointed it out.

all that’s really left is the tree. my lights were probably that old as well, i think they were also in a superfresh mart bag, until last year. one string is toast. which leaves me one string short of a lit tree. so annoying.

so i abandoned the tree for now, and filled the advent calender instead. since i know there will be eager girls off the school bus tonight looking for their december one treat. once, i bought sidney the cardboard deal, with the little doors and the “chocolate” that is clearly only a few ingredients off of full on wax. because i think it’s fun and a nice tradition, the two things christmas should be about. but ewwwww. i ate one of those chocolates and never bought one again.

then a couple years ago, my mom gave us a big fabric one, with little pouches you fill yourself. perfect! so now it’s one of my favorite parts, i go out and scour the dollar stores and bulk store for little surprises small enough for the pouches, and we can mix it up so it’s not all candy, i also found stickers and christmas erasers and pencils and a few other little things. and candy….duh.

this year i also want the big bowl of mixed nuts, and a nutcracker. i always remember as a kid, having those, and clementines too. and my grandparents with their big bowl of ribbon candy. it’s those little things that are only around at christmas that really make it special, and i want the kids to remember those things too.

hannah will be awake soon, to meet my nap time goal of cleaning the kitchen as well as getting the calender done, i must now leave the internet.

as is usually the case anyway……well…….that isn’t entirely true. i have vague memories of a time in my life where i would hop up out of bed no matter how little sleep i had had or how much alcohol i had had, and quickly get ready and leave the apartment, to catch some form or another of meandering public transit to any one of the many jobs i had held over those years. but they are vague. and since the small people who live here came along, i just can’t remember not being tired.

today, with sidney and olivia both off at school, i left hannah to look after daddy and headed into my dad’s office to do a “bit of filing” for him. hey, chirstmas is coming up, so any extra work i can pick up sounds good to me. of course, the job has turned out to be a bit of a nightmare. i’m going to blame it on partially, his poor filing system, and mostly on the “work” his step daughter did on it for him in the summer. yeah…..teenagers, and filing….maybe not so good. so about halfway into it today, i realised i was going to have to start from scratch, loaded up a few file boxes into my car and brought them home to make sense of them. literally one file to the next has been handled differently, i can’t even wrap my head around the logic behind it, if there was any.

not that it matters, i’ll fix it. i never believed the lady from the government who told me how well organized our files all were, until i saw my dad’s….maybe it’s true. i guess if being a huge organization freak can help you anywhere it’s there. then i’ll fix my mom’s….almost as bad. then hopefully it’ll be time to do our own, sadly, not so organized since the move and career change. but still waiting on some things there, i have a great accountant, too bad he’s so slow overworked.

i also got sidney a great snowsuit for an awesome deal today, nothing better then a great deal. after the advertised sale and the 25$ off promotional coupon they gave me, i got both pieces for less then the original price of just the coat. sweet. it is also exactly what she wanted

pink

all pink

seriously, i tried to talk her into the other colour of pants, but she was not having it, she wanted a pink snow suit and that’s what she got, a big ass, pink snowsuit. she tried to talk me into the matching gloves and hat, but it was no sale since she still fits into last years gloves and hat. though i did whisper the sales pitch to grandma in case she wanted to use it as a christmas present. trying to think of more non-toy idea’s this year…..the kids have TOO MANY TOYS. for real.

tomorrow it’s hannah and livie home. i’m going to try and plow through some more filing before i head into town to pick sidney up from school and we head off to her weekly swimming lesson. day after that it’s meeting at the bank. i’m actually looking forward to winter, and snow….which, if you know me, is crazy. i hope it will slow us down, i’ll go several days in a row without going into town for some dumb thing or another.

well that, and it’ll kill off the fucking cluster flies, truly,  i hate those little bastards