Things seem to be clearing up around here a bit. Yesterday Breanna was still stuffed up and feeling less than enthused about life. You can see it in her eyes in that picture, she was here but not REALLY here. Her naps were ridiculously short because she kept waking herself up by not being able to breathe properly but she was more or less okay.

Luckily she slept last night. She managed to only wake up twice while in the crib between 8:45 and 11:30. Then I went to sleep and I’m not even sure what time it was when she woke up again, but I brought her to bed and she miraculously slept the rest of the night, waking up at about 9:15 this morning (!) when the phone rang. Even better, I slept that whole time too, sleeping for almost ten straight hours.

I can’t tell you the last time I slept for ten hours. Seriously. As a mother, I have to tell you that ten hours of solid sleep is pretty much on par with having someone hand you a thousand bucks. I felt great this morning. I even felt better cold-wise, having dropped from blowing my nose every ten minutes to only every hour and a half or so; my nose is grateful because it was getting pretty sore.

Winter, in the meantime, has hit even though it’s officially still a couple of weeks away. We got blasted by the freezing rain the other day, but today it’s been snowing steadily since before we got up. It wasn’t a heavy blizzard, just lots of big flakes continuously hitting the ground and it’s cold enough that it’s sticking. Hayley even went out and played in it and shoveled over at George’s parents’ house today with his sister. It was one of those snowfalls where you actually think winter is kind of nice and pretty and I would have taken Breanna out in it for a bit to see what she thought of it except that 1) she was still technically sick, 2) we have to exchange her winter boots because the ones she has are too big but she’ll likely outgrow them before next year so they’re not worth keeping, and 3) I’ve had enough Canadian winters to know that as pretty as the snow looks right now it still sucks, I hate winter anyway, and there will be AMPLE opportunity to get Breanna out in the snow before the season is over.

Yes, I’m a little bah humbug about snow.

Hopefully by tomorrow everyone will be back to at least 90% functionality and we can get on with life again. Today I spent part of the day just madly cleaning up the incredible mess that had been generated by four sick people who just didn’t give a shit and I’d like to avoid having it get that way again. Also I have to get to the dollar store before Tuesday night because Wednesday is St-Nicholas Day and I have to pick up a few little things to put in the kids’ shoes before I go to bed Tuesday so they can find them in the morning. I had never heard of that holiday when I was a kid but I love it now. Last year I totally forgot and had to use some costume jewelry that I had from my younger years and a few cookies, so this year I want to actually pick some stuff up specifically for each of them. I’ll probably get Hayley some hair stuff and maybe something crafty, along with a chocolate bar, and I’ll find some kind of toy for Breanna. Dollar stores are perfect for this kind of thing.

Mostly though, I just want everyone better so I can stop hearing sniffing, snorting, sneezing, and whatnot, and stop seeing everyone – myself included – moping around like we’re all dying.

So, as you know, I’m doing holidailies again this year, wherein I try to update every day in December. Yesterday I did my post and only realized after the fact that there are writing prompts this year. Obviously, the prompts are optional, but yesterday’s was a suggestion to introduce yourself.

I feel really silly introducing myself on a blog that I’ve kept for years to readers who have also been here for an eternity. On the other hand, it is true that the portal over there means a bunch of new people who don’t know me at all may pop by, so an intro would be handy for them, especially since I would be delighted if they stuck around after December is over.

So. I’m Sherry. I’m 32 and I live in Montreal. Yes, everything you hear about Canadians discussing the weather is true, at least with me. I am sort of married to George in the sense that we’ve been living as common-law spouses for over seven years. We really do intend to get on with actually getting married officially some day but we’re both really lazy planners and I’m not a big “oh my god, weddings, woo!” kind of girl. Actually, to me the perfect wedding is one done at a destination resort where you walk off the beach, get married by someone at the hotel, eat a nice dinner, and swim in the ocean for the next week (if George is taking notes, I should mention that I really love Cancun, especially the Arrecife hotel) without having to worry about any details beyond the time of the ceremony. But for now the status quo works. We met while working at a now-closed recording studio and we got together after realizing that we have a lot of fun together. So far so good.

In those past seven years we had two kids, Hayley in 2002 and Breanna in 2005. Having kids has made everything different and interesting, and it also spawned the name of this blog, Chaos Theory. I’m one of those dreaded mommybloggers; while I do write about other things, my kids and parenting take the front burner an awful lot.

I started my first website in 1996 and it was totally hideous with a dark blue marble tiled (badly tiled, too) background, more animated gifs than your eyes could handle, and it was written in yellow text that scrolled on for miles. I almost wish I still had it somewhere so I could laugh at it. Over time I learned more html than just the center and blink tags and I discovered online journaling. In stereotypical fashion of many others who started that way, I just started writing about myself and only realized after the fact that there was a community of people dong the same thing. Eventually blogging started and I kept a separate blog with snippets alongside my journal. After Breanna was born I just didn’t have the time, energy, or inclination to keep up with both so I stopped the journal and made the blog a combination of both. It’s working for me.

My hobbies include wielding my digital camera like a weapon, watching more television than I should admit, getting sucked in to more reality television than I should admit, reading, occasionally knitting, and inhaling anything to do with Harry Potter. I always had a love of astronomy, hence the domain name, but didn’t have the brain to wrap around physics so a career never came to be. I always wanted to be an actress but was too afraid to pursue it seriously beyond some courses and very fun performances through them. I would really like to write more for a living though I do actually get paid to write for Webshots in their pet channel and I write for free over at Montreal Metroblogging. I’ve had a piece published at Imperfect Parent and have an upcoming piece as well in an online literary magazine. If I could keep doing that – preferably getting paid – while staying home with my girls, I’d be ecstatic. Not quite as much as I would have been in my Oscar acceptance speech, but close enough.

I guess that’s it. If there’s anything you want to know, just ask!

I made myself into a goofy dancing elf! You can too – it’s worth a giggle!

Well okay, we don’t have two houses but it’s still one of my favorite parts of Romeo & Juliet, and although it’s not an actual plague, melodrama is fun when everyone feels like crap.

Hayley is starting to get a little better but she’s still exhausted and sick and run down. Last night it really hit Breanna too. She woke up a ridiculous amount of times between 7:30 and 9:30, then she woke up screaming and was totally inconsolable. I couldn’t feed her or comfort her by rocking her and there was no way she was interested in lying back down again. I brought her out to the living room for awhile, and then took her back to put her to bed just as Hayley woke up.

Apparently Hayley didn’t go back to sleep until the early morning. Breanna did fall asleep but woke up – no joke – every five to ten minutes, crying because she couldn’t breathe through her nose. Being upset, the thing she wanted most was milk but of course she couldn’t get much because she needed to keep her mouth open to breathe. I dozed here and there, but had trouble drifting off because she sounded so rattly while she did sleep. I managed to get her to sleep at about 7:30 on top of me while I propped myself up against pillows. We stayed like that for an hour, at which point she wiggled off me in her sleep and we slept for another hour until George left.

She was fine when we first got up, as was Hayley, but it all rapidly deteriorated by the time breakfast was over. They both managed to hang in there while I had a purposely hot shower so that the steam would help us all, but then Breanna spiked a fever and was utterly miserable for most of the afternoon. Sometimes she tolerates the nasal bulb aspirator but other times she creams and pushes it away and I find myself cursing – yet again – the fact that mothers only have two hands when we clearly need at least four. In the meantime I’ve spent much of the day cleaning snot off myself that didn’t even come from me; one of the many things they don’t tell you before you have kids.

On top of it all, George can barely breathe and I am having trouble even getting water down because my throat hurts so much. My nose isn’t blocked but it won’t stop running, and more often than not it runs the wrong way which isn’t helping my throat at all. I think I’m going to get myself a hot cup of decaf tea because heat is the only thing that I think will help.

Well that and the fact that Breanna is now sitting on my lap, wild bedhead sticking up in all directions, laughing at my screen. That helps a lot too.

I’m so thrilled that my first Holidailies entry is all about how sick we all are.

The recent release of the trailer for “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” had me so excited I needed to be pried off the ceiling (and bless you all you sneaky people with your cameras, filming it in theaters and then posting the trailer illegally on YouTube for the rest of us). July 13th, woohoo. Since my birthday is the 7th, I will consider it the Potterverse’s birthday gift to me. I’ve also heard rumors that book seven – the final book in the series, wah! – will be released sometime in July as well, in which case I should write J.K. Rowling a fangirl letter thanking her for that birthday gift too.

I know a few people in Vegas and have a few other friends scattered throughout the U.S. who are tentatively talking about a mid-summer trip to Vegas for no other reason than to get together and see the movie. I can’t even imagine how incredibly, ridiculously fun that would be. I missed “Goblet of Fire” because, you know, I had a baby, but prior to that I saw the movies with George. George enjoys the storyline, but we have different levels of, er, obssession. As in, George still HAS NOT SEEN “Goblet of Fire” whereas I have seen it twice. He has never read the books whereas I have read all but book six at least twice, and I’m actually re-reading that one right now.

He knows nothing of the intense conversations that go on about the stuff we read between the lines, the theories, the conspiracies, the questions, the FANFIC, oh my god the fanfic (hel-LO Snape/Hermione and Harry/Ginny). I, on the other hand, can talk about anything and everything to do with Harry Potter until the sun sets and comes back up again. Hell, we do recall that I went out dressed as Hermione Granger for Halloween yes?

I’m a wee bit addicted. I have a feeling that when I read the last word on the last page of the last book in this series that I may very well end up being kind of like a crack addict who just ran out of drugs. I want to know what happens but there may be deflation when it’s all over.

So can you imagine someone like me (loser, I know) getting together with a bunch of other people like me (freaks) and going to a theater (with our hand-knit house scarves, naturally) and seeing the movie together, and then going out for food and drinks and dissecting the movie for hours afterwards?

It would be insane. I would probably go hoarse by the time I came home. But once again I find myself wishing that the world was just a little smaller so that it would be feasible to actually do that.

(You know, you guys could all just fly/drive/hitchhike up here. Montreal has theaters! We have a casino if you wanted to go play blackjack! We have POUTINE! Whimper.)

In other news, this is the last day of NaBloPoMo. I managed to post every day in November, even when I was busy or didn’t know what to write about when I sat down. I feel a little frazzled and drained by it. So naturally I will be starting Holidailies tomorrow, an entry every day in December (though they do cut a little slack and allow for five days off if you can’t help it). So there you go, another month of my daily posts. Aren’t you excited? I may need help this time around. If there was something you wish I had written this month and didn’t, let me know!

This home is quickly becoming a germ pit. Hayley is coughing and sneezing and sniffling like crazy, and she seems to feel absolutely miserable (especially if the whining about her nose is any indication, poor kid). Breanna is a little irritable but it’s hard to say whether she’s coming down with the plague too or whether it’s related to her teeth that are coming in, but she’s also sneezing a bit.

George has allergies so I can never tell if he’s sick or not but I know that I’m feeling a little bit run down myself. I’ve been sneezing every so often, my head hurts, and I just really want to sleep all day. Of course, everyone knows that mothers don’t get sick days because whether we work or stay home, we’re still on call 24 hours a day so I don’t really have time to be sick, especially if the kids are. I am really hoping that it’s a mild one for me, although at the very least I’ll get to pass the antibodies into Breanna’s system if I’m sick.

Fun, fun, fun.

In more festive news, we put our Christmas tree up last week. It’s oddly delightful to have it up with the lights on as soon as it starts getting dark outside. I used to be very bah humbug about getting ready for the holidays and grumbled about people who put their decorations and lights up before December. In fact I rarely got mine up before the middle of December at the earliest. This year I managed to make it until November 24th. I think it was about the same time last year too, shortly after I brought Breanna home. I guess having kids really did change my Christmas spirit.

Tonight I actually took pictures of the food I made for supper and for dessert. I was going to post them and tell you how I had made some very delicious honey garlic chicken on rice with vegetables. I was going to tell you that I had cast aside my normal “dessert is whatever we can find in the fridge or the cupboard” in favor of actually baking Irish Creme Chocolate lava cakes (which were almost illegally delicious, by the way).

I was going to do all that for two reasons. One, It’s day 28 of NaBloPoMo and I’m running out of steam, never mind the fact that I also signed up for Holidailies and thus must keep writing EVERY DAY for another month. Two, Hayley is coming down with a bad cold (complete with a load of tears over her very sore throat), and Breanna seems to be under the weather somewhat considering she woke up wet at 7, fell right back to sleep after a change (unheard of!), slept until 9:30, took a nap two hours later, and took another nap around 4. Personally I’m trying hard to ignore the fact that I feel a little scratchy in the throat and that I seem to be getting a sinus headache.

However, instead of boring you with my supper and dessert tales, I have decided to shamelessly rip of Jessica of Kerflop and do the “Celebrities I Think Are Really Hot” meme.

Come on. You know you want to know.

Continue reading →

All in good fun, this site will tell you if your blog makes you an A-list, B-list, C-list, or D-list “blogebrity”. Me? I’m a B. Go me.

The other day we went to an indoor play area and they had a ton of those tunnels you can crawl through, slides, ball pits, the works. They also had a small area for kids age one to three and even Breanna got in on the fun. She had such a blast playing in the ball pit, especially the bigger one when we would hold her and pretend to throw her in.

In fact it was so much fun that we’re going to prove we are completely insane by actually buying a mini tented ball pit for them for Christmas. No, I don’t know what we’re thinking and we will probably curse it forever but I know it will go over well.

Hayley wasn’t sure at first about going up in the big tunnel maze that ran the entire ceiling, but eventually she headed up, very cautiously. She intended to go up and come right back down. Ten minutes later she finally emerged, sweaty and thrilled at her adventure overhead. In the meantime, while I followed around on the floor below, constantly keeping an eye out for her pink socks, I got a cool shot of her in one of the transparent portions of the tunnel.

It was a lot of fun and I would go back again. Still, I can’t wait to get our own ball pit. Even if I currently have no idea where it will go!

Parents often know that one of the best ways to keep kids safe online is to educate them about internet safety and to keep all computers in a general family area instead of away in their own room. However, another method on top of those basic measures is to use keylogging software. It will keep a record of all typing done by your kids. As a result, you can make sure they aren’t accessing inappropriate sites or giving out personal information when you’re not looking.

Aside from a security feature, keylogging software is also a great way to keep records of your own activities for future reference.