Elisa’s Day

the pumpkins are carved, the costumes are as done as they are going to get, and everyone went to bed with thoughts of sweet candy running through their heads.

i was going to write a big entry about how i am a strong believer in moderation, that extremism of pretty much any kind doesn’t sit well with me. how i believe that into all childhood a little junk must fall. sometimes kids just gotta eat cotton candy at the fair, or a hot dog cooked on a bonfire, or candy on halloween. how i don’t think juice makes kids obese and diabetic, a childhood filled with poor diet and inactivity might, but a glass of apple juice with lunch…..please.

but now i’m tired, and survivor starts soon, so i’m going to cut it short, get the fire going and settle in to see what stupid thing the dumbest survivor team ever has in store for us tonight ( i am pretty much 100% sure there have been teams just as dumb, but they tend to fade from memory, of the what, 15 season of survivor, i bet i’d be hard pressed to name 7 winners off the top of my head )

another tuesday, another swimming lesson. always an odd stroll down memory lane for me. it was pretty crazy the first lesson, to see how the the pool hasn’t changed one bit in 25 years. of course back then it didn’t have ice rinks, or a gym, it was just the pool. these days it’s the recreation center, or “rec” center; but it will always be the aquatorium to me. what ever you call it, it is in serious need of some reno’s. first of all a family change room would be nice, and i’m sure all the moms there with little boys would agree. and would it kill you to paint, things are looking a little dingy. and what is the deal with all the floaty, pool toy thingies, tossed all over the deck, there to trip over and taunt all children who lessons start a few minutes late, to play with them. rubbermaid bin. that’s all i have to say about that. oh, and a few more benches would be nice. if i have to go out in bare feet, and sweat my ass off because it is 175 degrees in there, the least i could ask for is to not have to jockey for position, with 17 other bare footed, sweaty faced parents for one of the 6 spots on the one bench. and lastly, to the poor 16 year old girl, who must spend 30 minutes in the pool with 5 six year old, non swimmers, three of which are boys who mostly want to fool around, my sympathy you have, but if your job is to get in a pool and put your face in the water, then i have one word of advice……..waterproof mascara…….okay, that’s two words, but nuff said.

the only thing that makes it tolerable is that i signed sidney up in the same class as a friends son, so we go to their house right after school for a snack, then all head over together, and we chat  ( preferably while sitting on the much coveted bench ) while the kids swim. and when i say i signed her up in the same class, what i mean is that his mom and i went together at 7am the day of sign ups, to wait in line for over an hour to sign them up and get them in the same class. seriously. when she told me you had to line up at 7am to get your pick of classes ( or even get in at all depending on how quick the spaces fill up ) i thought she was crazy. until we got there, at 7:15am and took our numbers, 50 and 51.

but if it gets sidney swimming, it is, of course, all worth it. especially if we get out to grandma’s cottage more next year like we want to, and she’s more comfortable in the water. it’s really a safety thing, there is nothing worse then panicking in water, for real. in fact i think i may put all the kids in for the spring session. or maybe i’ll wait until school is out so they can go for a summer session, which is every day for ten days , as opposed to once a week for ten weeks. we’ll see i guess.

but today she swam a tiny little bit, with no floaty at all, which was pretty cool.

since it was asked for, i’ll post the kool aid recipe

2 cups all purpose flour
2 pkg kool aid  
1/2 cup of salt 
1 tsp cream of tartar 
2 cups boiling water 
3 tbsp oil

mix dry ingredients, add boiling water and oil and stir until well mixed. turn out onto a floured counter and knead until dough is a consistent texture. you may need to add small amounts of flour to reach desired softness. store in airtight container.

the cool thing about mixing it this way, is that the dry ingredients look completely white, but at soon as you pour the water it, it’s like it magically turns a bright colour

since i’m at it, here is my other, non-kool aid recipe, which also worked great, just doesn’t smell as nice !

2 1/2 cups of flour
1/2 cup of salt
2 teaspoons of cream of tartar or alum
2 cups boiling water
2 – 3 tablespoons of oil

food colouring for colour

combine the ingredients, stir well. Knead the dough. Store in an airtight container

of adult conversation with old friends and fun had by all small people, lots of yelling and running and dressing up and colouring and fort building and general mess making. and now the kids are in bed and i’m eating a candy apple. i know right? how much better does it get? i heart candy apples

today was the last day of the market for the year. so that’s how we started off, braving the cold and the rain to hit the farmers market one last time. well……that is how some of us started off, some of us, the youngest two, opted to stay home and in jammies with grandma. but neither rain nor cold will keep sidney from her market cookie for breakfast, so off the three of us went.

then we really had a great day with company, and the kids did make their play dough, which turned out about as well as could be expected when i didn’t really read the recipe before buying the supplies. does that say 2 packets of koolaide? crap. well, we’ll just half the recipe for each colour. yeah, four batches of play dough going at once, with for impatient kids, while halfing the recipe in my head on the fly……consistency might be slightly off. if it’s still too soft tomorrow, i’ll add more flour i think. but i expect, if the recipe was followed, it would work well. the kool aide seems like a better way to colour it then food colouring. of course the pressing question is, who really cares about the intricacies of play dough making? probably not many of you !

it’s strangely comforting to know i am not the only canadian coveting the take out boxes of american tv fame. i didn’t even get my chinese food btw, closed for renovations. so sad.

tomorrow is the clean up of previously mentioned general mess making, and then some pumpkin carving and costume planning.

finally friday. as stated a few posts back, i believe that i look forward to all opportunities to sleep in much more then the children. but i’m sure they’re also looking forward to the weekend. plans include making a number chart to hang in the playroom, working on halloween costumes, carving pumpkins, and making some play dough, i have a different recipe to try, that uses kool aide.

we’re having some visitors tomorrow, and one of them is of the kid variety, so i’m thinking maybe she’d like to make play dough too, i guess we’ll see.

i spent a fair amount of time this summer researching various heating methods, to replace the old oil wood combo furnace that is here. but now that we’re using it, i kind of like it. like a wood stove, but with a big fan and duct work. we’ll be trying to mostly burn wood and avoid having the oil kick on as much as possible. i think i’ll look into whether or not there are high efficiency versions made.  the upstairs is still chilly at night, but after living in an old victorian, where each small bedroom had it’s own hot water radiator turning it into a sweatbox, i’m think i’d prefer to fall on the chilly side.

it snowed here. like stayed on the ground snow. it’s gone now, but the kids were pretty darn excited about it. i’m thinking maybe some sleds are in order for chrsitmas. ryan is trying to figure the best way to use the snow blower attachment for the tractor to make the kids a good snow hill.

i think we’re going to get chinese food for dinner.

here’s a sad fact about canadian chinese food take out. it doesn’t come in those cool boxes you see on american tv. it comes in mostly aluminum pie plate type deals with cardboard lids, or sometimes plain rectangular boxes. i have always wanted chinese take out in the boxes you see on tv. always.

i mean i could bore you with more details of my boring day, filing, stop, get olivia, take her to doctors appointment, return her to school, go back to filing, take more filing home to make 3pm appointment at bank, get home to make dinner and get the play by play of hannah and daddies day of fun.

but, instead, for my dear friend carrie, a true urbanite, lets talk about the cluster flies.

i don’t actually know much about them research wise, and being out here, where we surf the web likes it’s 1994 and all, i’m not about to start looking things up on the interweb. so lets just talk about my first hand experience with them. i’m actually sure carrie has heard me lament about them before, since we also had them the other time we lived in the country. ahhh tweed. tweed was fun. in fact most of the fatal flaws with residing in tweed, had little to do with rural living and everything to do with that place…….everything that is except for the cluster flies. living in the country i loved, but tweed, alas, too far from town….solved, too far from my mom, definitely solved….but oh oh how i hated those flies and oh oh how i wished to never ever live somewhere ever again that had them. and here we sit, right now actually, while a few of them buzz frantically around in the glass shade of lamp beside my desk….a sound that has come to grate on my very last nerve.

cluster flies, i believe come from freshly turned soil, so live next to a framers field and you probably have them. then they swarm your house by the hundreds and get in every crack and cranny of windows and doors possible, so there are now hundreds of flies in your house, buzzing around in the windows. dropping dead everywhere. flies in the potty, flies in kitchen aid bowl, flies in the dishwater. when there is no more light in the windows to attract them they search out your house lights, buzzing around and bonking into them endlessly and frantically. they are erratic ( makes them hard to swat ) yet dopey all at the same time. some times one will fall out of the air, end up on it’s back and be stuck there, buzzing loudly around in a crazy circle unable to get itself righted, and i have to search it out, listening, following the buzzing, so i can put it out of it’s misery. i have found the best way to keep them at bay in the windows is the duster buster, not particularly pleasant, but better then fly strips or any other number of solutions.

it seems to go on forever too, starting late in summer, and going all through fall, well into the cold. even after days of cold weather, i still have them ( in lesser numbers ) and one bright sunny day will bring them back in swarms.

they really, truly,  make me insane, and if anyone has any suggestions as to what to do about them, i would love to hear it.

even though i don’t really like the idea, i will likely have the house sprayed next year ( i believe, at least , they only have to spray the outside of the house ). i can’t handle it. i know some people can “just live with it” but i don’t think i can.

so there, carrie, is the saga of the cluster flies, it beats your sad, squirrel i didn’t even see story, hands down i’m afraid !

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

looks like it’s just the girls tomorrow at the farmers market, with dad away for the day. not quite sure of the logistics of keeping track of three small kids in a crowd on my own, but i know it involves at least a stroller, which i have no doubt hannah will not want to sit in ( though, she is going through a “shy” stage, so she may be content to sit in it surrounded by all those “scary strangers” )

i wanted to say that i appreciate everyone’s comments on my last entry, and update that we’ve decided to ride out this year, and see where we are at the end of it, and because i think switching schools would be easier at the beginning of the year. so we’ll take the summer to decide based on how this year goes for sidney, with us not really helping with any french at home, and sticking to our 10 minutes of homework a night. the meeting was fairly useless, as expected, but it’s not a big concern of mine at this point, and until sidney seems unhappy for any reason it won’t be.

we did unpack our halloween stuff today, a few decorations and books. i like to keep holiday books as  special things, that only come out on the holiday. it avoids the absurdity of reading christmas books in june, and makes them that much more exciting when they are out. the downside of course, is that they get put into HEAVY rotation. so, since yesterday, i believe that BOO! by robert munsch has been read 72 times ( okay…maybe like 7 or 8 times…but still ) there is also a board book with a vampire on the last page who lets out a very scary “wha ha ha ha” laugh that is quite popular with hannah, who opens it to the last page, giggles, says “oooo, scarwy” and does it all over again.

i also found a couple meters of black polar fleece ends at the local fabric store, for just a few dollars, which will be sidney’s bat costume, and possibly olivia’s vampire costume. i took all they had in black, but it might not be enough. i’m going to check back later in the week, to see if there is more, and to pick out some fabric to make some duvet covers for the girls for chritsmas. i’m thinking something soft and fuzzy, especially since all things soft and fuzzy are buy one meter get two free right now.

i guess that’s it for tonight, always more to say, but i ramble. ryan is watching hockey so i’ll be crawling into bed to watch whatever i have taped from this week that i haven’t had time to watch yet, assuming i can stay awake that is

we seem to have finally recovered from our crazy thanksgiving, and have settled back into our routine. tomorrow i am off to have a meeting with sidney’s teacher. i am having some issues with her school, and the french immersion program, as well as with her teacher specifically. of course the most important thing to remember at all times, is that it’s MY issue, and sidney seems quite happy with all of it. so i have to be careful not to project my all too numerous issues with the school system in general onto sidney. that being said there are some real problems.

like homework.

in grade 1.

and okay, i can’t really get on board with homework in grade one, but after talking with my mom ( the English teacher ) i have decided i can get on board with the practice of learning how to do homework. so i concede, we will do a small amount of “homework” each night. but only 10 or 15 minutes, which ends up being one of the 5 or 6 things they ( the school ) include in the homework. according to them your child should be practicing 5 high frequency words, 5 vocabulary words, reading from photocopied readers sent home, and practicing counting, from 1 to 50, by 1’s, 2’s, and 5’s !!!! yeah…..wtf?  well around here we work on the 5 high frequency words because they are on a test every friday, and we work on whichever numbers will be on the same test, this week it’s 30-40…….never mind that sidney, and i’m sure others, still don’t have 10-20 down, or 20-30….but hey, they’re moving on

oh, and did i mention it’s all in french?

of which i speak none. when i choose the french program, it was with the understanding that i need not know ANY french, and that my job as the parent was to give my child a strong english base at home to make sure their english didn’t suffer while they learned french AT SCHOOL….yeah, so a meeting with the teacher it is

and that’s not even getting into my personal dislike for her, and her old fashioned ways. her class is the only one ( of the three grade one french classes ) that has the kids in rows instead of groups, and yesterday, according to sidney ( a six year old is always a suspect source of course ) she told the class, of SIX YEAR OLDS “if you aren’t going to do the work, don’t bother coming here”

like dude…..that’s something you spout to an ornery grade 10 class, not a grade one class

at this point, i am very tempted to take them out of that school, the only french immersion school in the district, which they spend an hour on the bus to get to ( not that it is that far, it’s not, 8 minutes by car, they just have them on some crazy milk run of a bus ride ) and put them in the local english school, which i’m sure would come with a much shorter bus ride. but i still like the idea of them having the second language so…….i don’t know

this school stuff is hard

well, actually the final number wasn’t clear, it may have been 36, i also heard 34 and 35 being thrown around. either way, a big group of people to feed at one time, so the usual chaos ensued when it came to actually sitting down and eating. but in the end i believe everyone found a chair and got at least one serving of stuffing, so we’ll call it a success. the girls had such a great time, from basketball to vintage barbies ( my 20 yr old cousin’s old barbie collection ) to touch football and wii bowling. all good. of course, today we have some overtired and still sick kids, add in a sick mom, well…..not a pretty picture.

i run a pretty tight ship around here, bedtime wise, because lets be honest, some days, bedtime is the only thing keeping a mom going. so with hannah in bed at 6:30 and the older girls shortly after, usually done with stories and lights out by 7:30, the fact that dinner didn’t even hit the tables until at least 6:30 didn’t bode well for us. but like little troupers, they were still rocking the wii bowling at 9pm and even hannah was still going, enamoured with the homemade barbie house my uncle made so many years ago, that stands taller then hannah and is complete with carpet and wallpaper. by the time we said our goodbyes and found our way home, it was 10pm. the kids of course all crashed in the car before we hit the highway, but all woke up during the transfer from car to bed. but right back to sleep and minus much hacking and coughing that didn’t keep them awake, just worried mom, they slept until a lovely 7:30.

so another quiet day planned around here, before we’re back to school and our other regularly scheduled programing ( play group, swimming, lessons etc. )

i really love these family get together, i believe yesterday, we were only short one cousin, who was working. i would love to have everyone next year, and even more, i would love to have it here, so i wouldn’t have to be the first to leave with my exhausted kids. i want to stay and play euchre, and spend as much time as i can with family that i only get to see a couple times a year. it was pretty crazy to see the “kids” that i think of as kids dragging their feet because they were out a dance club last night, and all playing cards and drinking wine. i remember when i was the “young adult” at these functions, now the “kids” are, and we’re on to the third generation of kids. i love that we’re close, even though we don’t see each other much any more. i love catching up with my cousins i grew up with, and imagining the younger ones out at a club having fun, just seems like a perfect thing to do the night before thanksgiving.

all in all a great day, the only thing missing is turkey dinner leftovers, maybe my mom got some, i’ll have to raid her fridge later