Trick or treat! Happy Halloween!

About a month ago Hayley told us she wanted to be an Orca for Halloween. She told us she had seen an Orca costume at the dollar store, so we went to look and it turned out it was the end-of-summer clearance sale on swim stuff and it was just a small inflatable Orca for a pool. She was really disappointed and I said that there was just no way I could make her one.

Fast forward to last week. Hayley had finally decided to just be a vampire since they were doing some sort of age-appropriate Dracula project at school. Great, that’s easy! Dressed in black, a cape, some plastic fangs, and a bit of creative make-up. And then I saw a picture of a cat costume on some web site. It was black with a white belly and I suddenly thought how easy it would be to modify the black and white cat outfit to look like an orca. So the wheels in my head started turning and you know, it’s almost like a genetic quirk that I inherited from my mother where I can’t help but be crafty from time to time (though she is far better at it than I am – remind me to tell you about the Oscar the Grouch costume she made for me once which then got recycled into a Bookworm costume).

I couldn’t find any cat costumes in black and white so instead I bought her a pair of six dollar black stretch pants, got out my brand new black hoodie, an old white t-shirt, some cardboard and black tights, and I set to work. (Clicking the image will take you to a photo with notes on it.)

I cut out a white shape to attach to the front of the sweater, which will be paired with a white turtleneck to make the white underside of an Orca. I also cut out two white ovals to sew on either side of the hood, which will be the trademark white patches Orcas have on either side of the head.

I wanted to sew the white parts loosely so that I can hopefully remove them without leaving any damage since I’ve only worn the sweater twice. Luckily I suck at sewing in general so I couldn’t sew tight stitches if you paid me anyway.

I also cut out a piece of cardboard to make the shape of a dorsal fin and a tail, then wrapped them in chopped black tights. Those will be pinned to the back of the sweater and the pants. Since it’s my sweater it’s just big enough to fit a light jacket underneath.

Hayley was so excited this morning that she had to try the sweater on after she got dressed for school. She loves it and I think it’s gong to be a hit with her. I’m sure some people will think that she’s a penguin or a panda, but that’s okay. We know what she is, and since she’s so good at imitating Orca noises, she can just do that all night long. All I know is she loves the movie Free Willy with a serious intensity and she is thrilled to be dressing up as an Orca tonight.

(Can I just take a moment to be irate and point out it was just after 7 am and yet look how freakin’ dark it still is at that hour through the blinds in our window?!)

Have a safe Halloween! I look forward to eating Hayley and Breanna’s candy!

Win a Dyson “Pink” Vaccuum in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month! I would LOVE a Dyson so I’m hoping to win, but if I can’t be the winner, I’ll settle for knowing YOU won it. Hurry, contest ends soon!

The interesting thing about toddlers is that as much as we try to understand them, sometimes we just really don’t know what the hell they’re thinking in that noggin of theirs. Like fears. I can hide behind the couch, jump out and roar, and Breanna will jump three feet in the air and collapse in a heap of laughter, thrilled to have been scared by her mom.

She’s developing some fears though, and they occasionally make sense. And they occasionally do not. She is scared of loud noises that don’t consist of me saying “BOO!” at the top of my lungs. I think the steam rollers started that and now every loud bus, truck, or car missing a good muffler freaks her out as she asks, “what THAT?!” Living on a fairly busy street, that’s a fun one. Still, I get that one. It has also morphed into a fear of the vacuum (she won’t cry but she will run out of the room as fast as she can and when I finish she peers around the corner asking, “all doned? All doned bacuum?”), the blender, and the electric mixer.

Downstairs, right in front of our front step there is a weird plant growing out of the crack in the cement. Hayley touched it one day and discovered it’s prickly and hurts. When Breanna went to touch it the next day, I said, “no don’t touch. Prickly! Hurt.” She took that one to heart and now freaks out whenever she sees it even though it’s perfectly easy to avoid it by going up the step on the opposite side. She’s also afraid of a cactus that we have inside even though she’s in no danger of accidentally touching it. She will now point at it and ask “what that?” in a trembling voice. When I say, “a prickly plant” she will jump back and say, “AHH!” very dramatically. It’s funny but sad at the same time.

She laughs at the ghosts in the haunted episode of the Backyardigans but she was afraid of the silk leaves I put out on the table with the Halloween decorations until I finally got her to touch them. Today, Hayley brought home a construction paper witch that she had assmebled which was about as tall as she is and I taped it in the hall. After an hour I had to move it into her room because Breanna refused to leave the room because she wouldn’t walk past it.

I try not to laugh because I know it’s serious to her but sometimes it’s hard.

Breanna loves pumpkins though. LOVES them. She screams with delight when she sees them and loves to hold the plush ones we have. We bought two pumpkins today for carving and she was ecstatic, hugging them and yelling about the “pumpkin patch”. So when we went to Zellers for a moment to get something for Hayley’s Halloween costume (I’m making an Orca costume for her, I’m going to be so happy and excited if it works out as well as it does in my head), and I saw a toddler-sized pumpkin costume, I grabbed it thinking, “what a perfect costume!”

You see where this is going yes?

She freaked right out when I came near her with it. I wanted to get her to try it on to make sure it fit and was loose enough for a warm coat underneath, but you would have thought I was trying to stick a hot poker through her skin. I managed to get it on her and she yelled, “OFF! ALL DONED! OFF!” but then she let me hold her for awhile. After she calmed down, I stood her on the bed so she could see herself in the mirror and she started laughing. She bounced a bit and when she saw how the pumpkin bounced around, she laughed harder. Eventually I took it off but then we put it back on to show George later and she was okay again.

I think it will be okay on Halloween night. Besides, she’s going to be pretty distracted by the activity around her. Granted, she may also be terrified by the activity around her, but at least her pumpkin costume will be the least of her worries.

And she sure looks cute in it!

Ah well. Just file this one with the rest of them under “never saw THAT one coming”.

This is a wicked tutorial on how to make a very cool play kitchen out of an entertainment unit. I wish I had the space to do this. We kind of need our entertainment unit but I would be willing to buy a used one from the Salvation Army or Craigslist just to have an excuse to make this! (Via Kerflop.)

It’s been linked pretty well everywhere, but in case you missed it, if you have a daughter, see this Dove video called “Onslaught”. It made me cry a little. Talk to your daughters.

Last week, Hayley was home from school for two days. The first day, she had a sore throat and quite the sneezing, sniffling, dripping cold going on. She stayed home and was miserable, moaning about how horrible she felt. I was glad I kept her home because she either would have made her entire class sick, been traumatized like she was when she was sick on her second day of school and we’d be back to persuading her through her tears to go back, or she’d be in the nurse’s office while the school secretary called me to pick her up. Or all of the above.

The second day, she seemed to still be feeling crappy so she stayed home again, but she was practically jumping off the couch by ten and I was wondering why I hadn’t sent her crazy ass to school.

She still had a dry cough but she was more of less fine, so she went to school last Friday, went out for a walk in the woods with us on Sunday, and was fine at school on Monday through Wednesday. In fact, getting her to school has been going exceptionally well. I have trouble dragging her out of bed at 6:30 and I have to remind her to please eat her damn breakfast, but once she’s dressed and on her way, she’s happy and lately she’s been going into the school with some of her friends, either classmates or kids in the other Kindergarten class, and often she runs across the school yard and into the building, not even looking back to make sure I’m waving at her (I am). So that’s been nice.

But then on Thursday, George woke me up while getting ready for work and told me Hayley had a sore throat and a fever. He carried her in and put her beside me and it was like someone had placed a furnace in the bed. She was really not well. I called the school and left a message to say she wouldn’t be in and although none of us went back to sleep, Hayley spent the entire day lying on either of the two couches, moaning and cycling through fever spells.

She was still warm when I gave her some Tylenol on Thursday night and she was warm and sweaty despite a comfortable room temperature when I checked on her after she fell asleep, so I told George we’d keep her home again; he called in this morning. She’s better in the sense that she played more, including making a mess in the living room, her bedroom, and scattered papers and markers all over the kitchen table, but in between, she pulled out a sleeping bag, placed it on the living room floor, and she would lie down, feverish again, to watch a movie. She also hasn’t been eating much, partly because her throat still bugs her, and partly because she doesn’t have much appetite, not even for ice cream.

And you can tell she’s not faking it:

It sucks. She caught something directly on top of her previous cold. Breanna’s dealing with a minor cold (and also molars, yay) and the humidifier is going non-stop so she can breathe and sleep. I’ve been sick since Saturday and it’s not going away because Mom doesn’t get to rest what with taking care of sick kids and housework and cooking and work. I’m not sure how George is feeling since he has allergies and sneezes all the time anyway, but I know he’s tired all the time and works too hard and sleeps too little.

We need a vacation. A germ-free, restful vacation, even just a weekend. It’s times like this when I’m tired and cranky and dealing with snotty tissues all over the floor and being tied to this laptop all the time that I really wish it was two years ago and we could just hop in the car and go to my grandmother’s house for a weekend away from everything.

I need a cottage in the woods to visit in times like this. I’d take my camera and leave everything else behind. Maybe bring some reading material and just read books all weekend, in between being outside with nature.

That sounds nice right now.

Hahaha! The 10 Most Terrifyingly Inspirational ’80s Songs. Absolutely hilarious.

Funniest cake screw-up EVER.

Today on Canada A.M., which is my favorite Canadian morning news show (and not just for Seamus O’Regan, shush), they asked their daily poll question. This time it was “are you obsessed with the weather?” It’s a common stereotype that Canadians are indeed hooked on weather. I think part of it is just because we have so MUCH weather. Part of it is also because I clearly missed my calling and should have studied to be a meterologist. Alas.

(I voted in the poll. I chose “yes” only because “HELL YES” wasn’t an option.)

Lately I don’t know what’s happening. Our leaves have changed colors but they’re muted instead of the vibrant shades we usually get. A great deal of them are staying at yellow instead of orange or fiery red which is a shame because there’s nothing more beautiful than a tree full of leaves that look like they’re on fire. It’s sort of like the weather stayed too warm and humid, got cold enough just long enough for them to start, and then it warmed up again. The trees got confused and just said, “eh, screw this then” and dumped them all. We went for a family walk in the woods yesterday like we do just about every year, but it wasn’t as breathtaking as it usually is. I took a lot of pictures but I did it because the woods are beautiful anyway, not because the leaves were screaming at me to photograph them.

When we were getting ready to leave, we assumed it was cold out since it looked like it was out the window. Hayley was sick last week and Breanna and I were coming down with it, so we all dressed warmly. When we got outside I nearly died. Between my long sleeve shirt, my sweater, and my fall jacket, not to mention the fact that Breanna was strapped to me in the baby bjorn, I was sweating before I got halfway up the block and I had to take my coat off.

Today I sent Hayley to school in her tunic and knee socks, with a t-shirt underneath. She’s been begging for her tunic but she needs new tights since her current ones are stretched out, and it’s been too cold in the mornings for just socks. Today it was so warm in the morning that she never even shivered once outside. And I was happy I hadn’t made her wear a long sleeve shirt when the afternoon actually ended up humid.

We’ve actually had to put the A/C on a few times over the past several days – not all day long like in the dead of summer, but A/C in late October? What?

It’s not that I’m looking forward to winter, because I hate the cold and the snow, but I also hate humidity. I like October because usually you can wear sweaters and you feel like baking and you don’t break into a sweat over a cup of tea at 10 pm. Lately, that’s just not happening. Thank goodness I didn’t put my summer clothes away yet, I’m making good use of my t-shirts.

And I’m drowning my weather sorrows the best way possible. With Lindt Madagascar dark chocolate. *drool*

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If you have picky eaters who would rather starve than eat a vegetable, I did a review of a nifty book called Deceptively Delicious over in my review blog. Enjoy!

Tonight we had some good friends over for dinner and it was very nice to just relax and eat tasty food (grilled Italian sausage, cheese & broccoli rice, mixed vegetables, wine, cookies & cream cake) and have wonderful conversation with people.

Because of that, the kids didn’t go to bed until 10:30, which was no big deal since I had anticipated that and gave Breanna a later-than-normal nap so she would be okay to stay up a bit. When I went into the bedroom to put her down, she was very quick to drift off, and I gently rolled her off of me and onto the mattress. Usually when I do that, I get her right over on her stomach since she’s like me and sleeps best that way. Sometimes she’ll stay flat like that, other times she’ll turn a bit so her head faces the other way. Either way, she rarely stirs much.

For some reason when I did it tonight, she immediately pushed herself up into a push-up position, looked around (though her eyes were closed), stiffened up, shouted, “Where penguins?!” and then flopped straight down and went to sleep.

It’s like animated movie Tourette’s. I guess tomorrow morning’s movie will be Happy Feet.