What Happens When You Add An Almost Seven Year Old…

… and Mommy’s brand new camera together:

Feels Like Summer

Yesterday was a PD day at Sweetpea’s school, and it is finally sunny and warm around here, so we spent the afternoon at the park. She splashed in the water park, played in the sand and ran full tilt with other little girls enjoying the sort of freedom that can only come from being in your bathing suit on a Monday. Other than her claims of being “bitten by a caterpillar” (I am still trying to work that one out) – it was a blissful afternoon.

While there I managed to finish knitting the baby dress:

Now it just needs to have the ends woven in (I didn’t bring any darning needles with me, unfortunately) and a good soak and blocking and it will be all ready to be mailed off. I also ripped back the Sock That Ate Manhattan, and started knitting it again at a more human size. When not knitting, I was reading the perfect summer book; “The Missing Ink” by Karen E. Olson. It’s part of a mystery series revolving around a tattoo artist living in Vegas,and is just the sort of thing to read while sipping lemonade at the park.

Just try and avoid any carnivorous caterpillars.

A plague o’ both your houses!

The chicken pox descended upon our house last week and it is amazing exactly how much chaos can be created by locking a bored six year in the house for four days. Each day is an escalation in the scope and pure magnificence of the disaster.

I fear for tomorrow.

I have learned a few things this week:

1) Playdough ground into a pair of tights is a laundry dilemma that will never be solved. Buy new tights.

2) An Ipod playlist filled with Katy Perry, The Go Gos, Beyonce, and Pat Benatar will keep a child entertained in an oatmeal bath for a good forty five minutes. Will worry about explaining what “you PMS like a bitch” means later.

3) After several hours of playing Barbie Parties on the Glam Jet, aka “What Happens in the Cargo Bay Stays in the Cargo Bay” – I realized that my problems with Barbie have nothing do with feminist theory and more to do with the size of Barbie’s accessories in relation to the heating grates, vacuum cleaner hose and the cat’s intestinal tract.

4) It will take approximately 3 days, 18 hours, and 27 minutes to write a 300 word blog post.

5) The 87 episodes of Spongebob Squarepants that I previously thought was bordering on excessive? Totally not. Considering writing thank you notes to Nickelodeon and whoever invented the PVR.

6) Monopoly Junior is the friendly socialist version of Monopoly where you spend your money on pony rides and miniature golf, rather than using your resources to create a vast and powerful empire that will financially crush your neighbours and force them from their comfortable middle class homes into a tenement on Baltic Avenue.

7) Benadryl, no matter what the pharmacist says, will not make a captive six year old drowsy.

Mighty Life List – 2010 Roundup

We went on an actual family vacation to Florida this past November:

I would have posted pictures after returning from this momentous event, but there was a small incident between my laptop and a glass of grape juice that kept my pictures from me for several weeks. The laptop is now a decorative paperweight, but thanks to Mr. Man and his super handy tech skills the contents of my poor beleaguered laptop have been recovered. During our vacation I managed to cross a few things off my Mighty Life List:

* Swim in the ocean:

* Ride a roller coaster with my daughter:

* try 100 new foods:
okra, grits, hush puppies, sweet tea, mustard greens, and frozen custard

I didn’t like the mustard greens. The sweet tea was really, really sweet and the grits were great covered in butter and salt, making them basically a vehicle for ingesting huge amounts of butter and salt. The okra was surprisingly yummy. The hush puppies were good and the frozen custard was a revelation. I dream about the frozen custard sometimes.

We also did something that would have been on my Mighty Life List had I known it was even a possibility. We went to an animal sanctuary and fed the flamingos. It was seriously cool. You should go add it to your list right now.

I found the flamingos to be a very interesting study in contrasts. They are beautiful and graceful from far away…

… and surprisingly alien and slightly creepy close up:

I wrote my life list in October, and am pretty satisfied with crossing two things off in 2010, as well as getting a start on a third. It is funny what a sense of satisfaction accomplishing those things my list gave me – it has really fired me up to attempt even more, more, MORE.

Christmas Eve…

… after a day of skating, shopping, baking and crazy six year old anticipation, we have made it to here:

Happy Hallowe’en!

Good Intentions

I was going to post about my weekend trip to Toronto, and show off all the goodies (both of the yarn and shoe variety) I brought home with me, but a certain six year old was taking pictures today and now I can’t find my camera. Which worries me a little, because if it should fall into the wrong hands I am pretty sure among all the snaps of her Polly Pockets and Webkinz there is a really unflattering picture looking straight up my left nostril.

My little darling has been home the past few days, having a little break from the rigors of summer camp before school starts. I had thought to tackle the exciting “school supplies extravaganza” this week, but I have yet to receive a letter requesting that I fork over a mortgage payment for a mountain of glue sticks, pencils, safety scissors and three pronged folders with pockets in puce, ecru, and chartreuse – in the elusive 9 1/2″ x 11″ size, not the 8 1/2″ x 11″ size carried by every store on the planet. In fact, I am so entirely in the dark this year that not only do I not know what classroom she will be in, I am not sure what time school even starts.

In a week and a half.

Our school system is adopting a “staggered busing” timetable this year, where all the school will be able to share buses by changing the times school starts and ends. Our school day used to begin at 9:00 am and end at 3:10. I received a letter from her after school program saying that the school day would be changing to 8:20 am to 2:45 pm. The school website has a posting from earlier in the summer that says the day will be from 8:05 am to 2:20 pm. Of course no one is answering the phone at the school. They are probably all hiding under their desks wishing the phone would just stop ringing, already.

The weather hasn’t been as warm as I had hoped, so instead of lounging around the beach this week as planned we have been doing that exciting thing called “making your own fun”. We have spent her allowance on Webkinz products and a new book, we have visited the museum, the library, the farmer’s market, the ice cream shack and the drug store – where we spent a good forty-five minutes sniffing different body washes whilst trying to decide between the “refreshing pomegranate splash” and “sparkling grapefruit sugar” scents. These decisions can’t be rushed. We have read books, played on the computer, weeded the garden, splashed in the kiddie pool, played the “zoo game” (the rules of which I am still not entirely clear). We have made a treasure chest from a cereal box, a vase from a salsa jar and a frog puppet out of a paper lunch bag. I even started teaching her how to knit and I am keeping the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies in emergency reserve. It’s only Wednesday and if the weather doesn’t perk up soon, things could get ugly around here. It is supposed to rain tomorrow, so I have pulled out the big guns.

I have arranged a play date. From 11am ’til they want to kill each other or dinner time. Whichever comes first.

Let’s Change The Subject, Shall We?

I was going to write an entry about what I have been knitting lately, but I realized it just highlights how very fickle I can be. I currently have four – yes, four – different pairs of socks on the needles, as well as this sweater, and I just started another dish cloth this morning. Then there is the unfinished stuff that is so old that it doesn’t even get counted as a “work in progress” because in order to be a work in progress there needs to be work that is progressing and there hasn’t been any of that happening since around the same time dinosaurs roamed the earth.

I admire traits such as constancy and dedication, but apparently I am totally not interested in putting them into practice.

So we will talk about something else, okay? Let’s talk about the Sweetpea, who is attending her very last day of kindergarten tomorrow. Crazy! She has learned so much this year – all that fun kindergarten stuff like adding and subtracting and learning how to read. Reading books! On her own! I keep asking her: “What does this say? What about this?”

It doesn’t ever get boring hearing her read stuff. Well, not for me anyways. She is beginning to wonder why I can’t read all this crap myself and quit making her to do it for me.

We enrolled her in soccer this summer, and she is having a great time. Granted, she is taller than most of her teammates, so they mostly end up chasing her around the field so of course she is finding it fantastic. Watching little kids play soccer is a pretty hilarious way to spend an afternoon at least – what with the kids accidentally chasing the ball right into another game, stopping to take a rest in the middle of the field, knocking the net over onto themselves, or just lying down in it to take a nap “because it is taking too long for them to get back here”.

I think the next time I am left waiting at a restaurant for my friends, I am totally going to stretch out on the table and have a little snooze.

2009 – The Good Bits Version

I’ve been playing around with slide shows this weekend, and came up with this to end the months long silence around here:

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Pumpkins! Pumpkins!

This is the first time I have carved pumpkins since I was kid, and it is awesome. I am already planning next years pumpkins, which will apparently involve electronics and a heavy dose of craziness. I can’t wait! I am really pleased with how the pumpkins turned out, unfortunately I have misplaced my camera so was forced to take these photos with my cell phone. So they kind of suck.  One unforeseen consequence of the pumpkin carving was Miss T’s absolute devastation upon learning that her precious Blues Clues pumpkin will have to be composted soon. She actually drew a picture today depicting a sad Blue pumpkin and a sad little girl bound together in their misery and loss.

I think we need a therapy jar.