George is currently on vacation, which is really nice and the kids are seriously loving that. We’re doing the whole “vacation at home” and “play tourist in your own city” thing this year which is fun to do. On Sunday we took it easy by going to our favorite little second hand bookstore (I’m still determined to go there without the kids some day so I can just really browse and take my time). George and I each got a book and the kids picked out two each. I got Reading Lolita in Tehran and look forward to reading it as soon as I finish the ridiculously good Three Cups of Tea.

On Monday we had our first real excursion by going to the Montreal Biodome. That is honestly my favorite place in all of Montreal (Chinatown comes a close second, Old Montreal/the Old Port third). It has four ecosystems – the rainforest, the Laurentians, the St. Lawrence sea way, and the Arctic/Antarctic regions. And naturally, it has all kinds of animals, birds, and fish to go with each.

Breanna is about the same age that Hayley was for her first visit and she reacted the same way – she loved all the fish. She was completely entranced by them, especially the giant tank that had fish bigger than she is. She kept screaming with excitement every time she saw something new. She was also a big fan of some of the brightly colored birds. However, the biggest hit for both Hayley and Breanna was the penguins.

Every time one would dive down and swim past us, there was a lot of laughing and shrieking.

I think the best part was that we had told her about the penguins but she didn’t really understand. Then we got to the Antarctic region and they had a film about penguins being played on the big wall when we walked in. She walked right up and started patting them and I really think that she thought that was it. When she turned around and wandered over to where the real penguins were, her eyes were huge and she had such a gigantic grin on her face. It was very cute.

Hayley has been three times before but it still hadn’t lost her charm. She was also really enthused by the learning center downstairs where they’ve had taxidermists stuff a lot of different animals, they have microscopes, fossils, and all kinds of things that they’re not only allowed to touch, but encouraged to handle. She really wanted to stay in the center longer, but we were hungry for lunch. She also kept wanting to go in and do stuff with the animals. I told her in the car that if she really wants to do stuff like that, she can study science when she’s older and work with animals just like that. She was pretty keen on that!

We ended the day by going to McDonalds for lunch (always a hit), letting them blow off some energy on the play structures there, and they each picked out two toys when we picked up some stuff we needed at the dollar store. So far the two biggest hits from the store were Hayley’s indoor bowling set and Breanna’s mini dinosaur collection (we have more dinosaurs here than some girls have Barbies or Polly Pockets).

We’re also hoping to do some swimming at the nearby pool if it ever stops raining, we want to go to a petting farm, and some day next week we’ll be going to a water park.

Vacationing at home is a lot of fun!

You can see a full set from the Biodome over here. I took a ton of pictures but you’re not allowed a flash (of course) and you’re not allowed tripods to compensate for the low light, a lot of pictures came out blurry. Still, I got enough decent ones and the kids are happy so many penguin shots came out well. Enjoy!

Over at Inside Motherhood, my blogging partner in crime Heather has put together a giveaway of epic proportions with prizes galore. Come on over and enter – all you need to do is leave a comment!

Five things my kids have said recently that have made me melt, smile, laugh, laugh harder, and choke:

1. Tonight – what made me melt:
Breanna (throwing her arms around me): You my best friend!
Me: I am?
Breanna: Yes! I happy! You happy Mommy?
Me: Well, I sure am now.

2. All the time – what makes me smile:
Breanna: Look! I upsy-down!

All kids have words they mispronounce and eventually they get it right, but I think all parents have a few words they wish their kids would never learn to say properly. I will mourn the day that Breanna says “upside down” instead of “upsy-down” or when she says “spaghetti” instead up “suppa-ghetti”. To this day I’m still glad Hayley says “Old McDonald’s” when referring to McDonald’s restaurant.

3. Past couple of weeks – what made me laugh:
Hayley (singing): Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?

(She got it from Alvin and the Chipmunks. Which is actually a fairly cute movie.)

4. Tonight – what made me laugh harder:
Hayley (singing loudly): I like big butts and I can not lie!
Breanna (shouting): I like butts in a can!

(That one’s from Shark Tale. Even funnier was that Hayley misheard the line the first few times so I realized she’d been singing “I like big butts in a cannon now!” for ages.)

5. Earlier this week – what made me choke:
Breanna (out of sight in the hall near the bedroom): Cocksucker! Cocksucker!
Me (after pounding my chest to re-start my heart): Wh… What? What did you say?!
Breanna (running into the living room, kicking a foam soccer ball): Go soccer! Go soccer! Yay! Go soccer!
Me (slumping into chair): Oh thank GOD.

Life is never dull around here.

It’s hot today. It’s not too humid, surprisingly, but it’s darn hot. It’s definitely too hot to go to the non-shaded park and I’m just getting over some weird bug so sticking close to home makes me happy. I thought I would set up the “ghetto pool” for the kids (and hopefully get a real one on the weekend) and let them play in the water with their dolls while I caught up on some Vitamin D intake and read my book out on the balcony.

We JUST got set up out there and the kids had just gotten in the water to cool off when a wasp showed up. If we were in a big yard I wouldn’t freak out too much about it even though I hate them, but this is a small apartment balcony. There’s not much space to put between us and the wasp and it was sort of hovering very close to the kids so I shooed them back inside.

We watched as the wasp decided it had nowhere pressing to be and continued to hover. I don’t know what’s so appealing. We have no garbage out there since we have dumpsters downstairs, we don’t have flowers, and there’s nothing sweet outside. Yet it’s certainly enjoying it. Maybe it’s the new bistro set. Perhaps he’s waiting for a waitress to take his order for a latte.

I got online and started looking for things to use to kill wasps when you don’t have the specific sprays, and more than one person said WD-40 works, and frankly that stuff reeks so much that I believe it. I’m surprised it hasn’t killed ME yet just from the spray whenever we’ve had a squeaky door.

The kids are currently playing in the other room with the door closed and I’ve sprayed at the wasp twice. The biggest problem is that I’m an enormous chicken shit so I can’t bring myself to get too close, so I’m sort of stretching my arm out as far as I can reach, spraying towards it, and then ducking back in, slamming the door behind me. If I could just face it up close, I could get it directly. I think it’s starting to work because I haven’t seen it for a few minutes but I want to wait until a full five minutes passes by without a sighting before I go back out, especially with the girls.

Because this is war, baby, and if that wasp isn’t dead yet, it’s going to be PISSED.

Oh.my.GOD.

Are you fucking KIDDING me?!

Summer is really killing my ability to update my blog, isn’t it? (Right, because I was so much better in the Winter, *cough*.)

Since I’m incapable of paragraphical (is that a word? It is now.) thought, here are some random bits over the past several days.

1. On Friday we got up early because Breanna had a doctor’s appointment. She weighs 28.5 pounds and is 36.5 inches tall. People always think she’s short, but she just has shorter legs than Hayley. Otherwise, she’s not that short in general and she’s going to be pretty tall as well, I think.

2. She really doesn’t like seeing doctors, which is understandable because most times she either feels fine but gets a needle jabbed in her leg or she feels like crap. However, she was relatively courteous to the nurse and the doctor. At one point the doctor said she was pretty good for her age since a lot of kids in that range scream and cry when you look in their ears or whatnot; I told him it was just because when she’s nervous about something she just tunes the world out and pretends no one exists.

3. She did perk up at the end when they gave her a free book. The children’s hospital is promoting literacy and reading to your kids by giving free books to all the children who come in for any reason. Breanna was ecstatic to get a Clifford the Big Red Dog book. As for reading to your kids, they clearly don’t know about her tendency to rip the book from your hands and toss it across the room. She much prefers looking at them by herself.

4. On Saturday, Hayley was invited over to her grandparents’ house for the day. Breanna was napping when Hayley left so it was only an hour later that she found out what had happened. She came out to the living room and asked where George was. I said he had gone to do some work at a friend’s house. Then she asked where Hayley was. When I said she had gone out, Breanna sat on the floor with her head on the couch and pouted. I told her to eat some lunch and we’d find something to do even though it was too hot to go to the park right then. I was actually about to pull out the big Rubbermaid container to make a ghetto wading pool for her, but George came home and said our friends Dean and Jo had invited us over. That settled it! We headed over there and spent the afternoon wetting our legs in the sprinkler, playing with the dog, and eating souvlaki for supper. Breanna decided she had had a suitable amount of fun – though she did still miss Hayley enough to call her to say hi on the phone.

5. They had built a new deck in their yard, and when Dean and George went to the hardware store for a minute, Dean came back with a little bistro set – a round table and two chairs made out of eucalyptus. George said it would be a good size for our balcony too and that it was only thirty bucks. We decided to go get one next week, but it turned out Jo really didn’t want it since they already had a set of furniture on the deck and she didn’t want more. We took it off their hands for them, saving them the nightmare of returning something and we didn’t have to wait to get it.

6. I love it. We moved here in 2000 and for eight years I’ve been wanting to do something with our balcony. I always said I couldn’t live in an apartment without a balcony because I’d feel claustrophobic, but in all honesty, I haven’t sat out there much at all. It gets a lot of hot, afternoon sun and there’s no roof or canopy so it’s blazing out there. I didn’t use it at night because there was no table and it wasn’t inviting. I still haven’t planted any flowers, but at least now I have this set and it makes the whole thing so much more cozy than it was.

LOVE.

7. After we left Dean and Jo, one of George’s friends came over for the remainder of the evening. I set up the table and chairs, despite George rolling his eyes at me in amusement over my lack of patience whenever I have something new – if I get something, I must use it NOW NOW NOW. The last laugh was mine when I came out to the living room after putting the kids to bed, only to discover George and his friend had gone outside and were sitting on the balcony, sipping vodka and enjoying the evening. We have a couple of those white plastic deck chairs everyone owns, so I pulled one of those up too and the three of us sat outside until about midnight, coming in only because it started to rain.

8. Today was rainy so that shot my plans to have my coffee outside on my balcony, but really it wouldn’t have been that relaxing anyway what with two kids who would want to be out there too. Since it poured in the afternoon, I got out the big rocks I brought home from the lake up north and set up some paint. They painted happily at the table, decorating their rocks, and I actually got all my work done (which was hopping because Angelina Jolie had her twins), and was able to relax with my excellent book for a bit.

9. And now that I’ve finished my cup of tea, I’m seriously considering slipping into bed and going to sleep at a relatively decent hour (11 pm is really good for me). I hope your weekend was as enjoyable as mine. Tell me what you did!

I love cabbage rolls. My grandmother used to make them and I would stuff myself with them. About 12 years ago I made them myself. It was the first and last time because good lord, what a messy job. So that’s why this is totally brilliant. The same idea as cabbage rolls but in casserole format?! YES PLEASE!

I was catching up on Carrie’s blog today, and I was embarrassingly behind due to holidays and camping and work and blablabla. Anyway, I read the entry where she mentioned that Sam loves the song “I Can Only Imagine” by Mercy Me. She also linked to the YouTube video.

I really love that song. That may surprise people, but it’s my favorite Christian song. It probably surprises people that I even HAVE a favorite Christian song. 🙂 (Actually I have two. “Mary Did You Know” is the other.)

Anyway, as much as I like the original, I still remember the first time I ever heard it, four years ago on Canadian Idol when Kalan Porter (who eventually won and has been the most successful CI winner to date, and is still my favorite competitor overall) sang it as his own song choice the week there were no themes to stick to. He got a bit of flak from one of the judges for singing a Christian song, and none of them seemed to love it other than his upper register, but it gave me goosebumps when I listened to it – partly because I just loved his voice and partly because it’s a great song.

So for Carrie, here’s the live Kalan version. The only misfortune is having to listen to the fangirls screaming here and there but they aren’t too bad. I really wish he’d release a cover version as a single.

Enjoy!

You know what the best thing is about working from home? The flexibility to suddenly go do something fun.

It was really hot and humid here today and I was thinking we would have to stay inside in the air conditioning and go out to the park or the courtyard after supper when the sun was lower. That wasn’t particularly appealing but there is no shade in the early afternoon in either of those places so we all overheat quickly.

Out of the blue, my friend emailed me to say her daughter had stayed home from daycare due to a late start to their morning and they’d be in the backyard enjoying the pool – did we want to join them?

Oh yes. Yes, please.

Luckily we had Hayley’s car seat in the living room and her son has a car seat like Breanna’s so George’s dad was nice enough to pick it up and come get us, then he drove us over. It’s really nice to have your in-laws around the corner, that’s for sure.

I took Breanna in the pool for a bit while the two older girls splashed around us, and then we got out because my friend had grilled some amazing salmon and made couscous and a side of fresh cucumbers, tomatoes, and feta cheese. It was delicious and I think I could eat that for lunch every day for a month before getting tired of it. When we were finishing up, her husband and George came in (they work together), having finished early. Instead of trying to work outside in that heat, they kicked back with a cold beer.

At that point my friend and I got in the pool with the girls and the baby and I think we were in there for an hour. It’s not a deep pool so Breanna can walk around without any help, which she really enjoys. Meanwhile, it’s deep enough that if and adult sits down, you can submerge yourself up to your neck. It was wonderful.

We were planning to leave but they ended up inviting us to stay and we had BBQ burgers and hot dogs for supper. The girls picked some fresh berries to eat and were such a mess that I took them all back in the pool for 20 minutes to rinse off, and just when I thought it was time to pack up to come home, I was surprised with a birthday cake – that was nice!

I got the kids to bed relatively easily (although Hayley came out three times to inform me that she was very tired but couldn’t fall asleep; I told her she might fall asleep if she’d STAY in her bed!) and felt myself sinking into that exhaustion that you can only get after a day of sitting in chlorinated water in the sun. It’s my favorite kind of tired.

It sure beat staying at home, hiding from the humidity!

Today (it’s still July 7th, barely) is my birthday and I just turned 34. I was mildly disappointed because I liked the number 33, but so far 34 has been just fine.

Yesterday we went to see my parents to help them out with some stuff and to have supper with them (my mother still makes a better spaghetti sauce than I do), and they even bought a black forest cake for me, something I always associate with my family. My mother said she didn’t know what to get me so she gave me a card with a cheque, and seriously, that is always welcome. I may put it towards a new set of contact lenses or I might buy some clothes. We’ll see.

Last Wednesday, a package arrived from my sister which was really hard for me because I don’t like to ruin surprises, but I also like instant gratification, so having a box sitting in my living room was difficult to ignore. I managed to persevere though, and I didn’t unwrap the packing stuff until today, then kept the gift itself for this afternoon. When I opened it, I was happy to find a nice set of fancy teas – I love tea at night but I had finished all my really good ones (except for my nice loose teas which I can’t use because a certain five year old lost the infusion ball), so I just had Red Rose type of tea bags. That’s fine, but I am looking forward to a nice cup of good tea tomorrow!

George, Hayley, and Breanna surprised me. And that’s an understatement. I wasn’t expecting anything in particular. George had asked me what I wanted and I was exceptionally helpful by shrugging and saying I didn’t really know. Luckily, he knew what I really wanted, even though I wouldn’t have actually asked for it. I was shocked when I reached into my gift bag and pulled out a box containing this monster:

It’s the Canon 75-300 mm lens and I still wonder if he actually thought I didn’t like it because in a move that was very uncharacteristic of me, I was momentarily shocked to utter silence. I couldn’t believe they gave it to me, I’ve been dying to get it for awhile now.

Between that, my camera itself, the “nifty fifty” I got back in March, and the wireless remote I ordered for ten bucks off of eBay, I am now pretty well set for a good while.

I can’t wait to take my new lens for a “walk” and see what I can get pictures of with that kind of focal length!

Other than that, it was a pretty low-key day. George had to work and so did I although I managed to get it done earlier in the day so my evening was free. That’s always nice. We had a quiet dinner and just took it easy. Hayley had soccer tonight but we planned ahead to ditch it so we wouldn’t have to rush through supper and getting out the door. It was good anyway, since it was super hot and humid today, to the point that the Weather Network sent me a high heat and humidity warning advising against outdoor activity and to drink a lot of water (yes, I’m that much of a dork, I get email reports about the weather!). It was cool enough after supper to just walk down to the store for some red wine, and I fired off a few test shots with my new baby:

LOVE.

I don’t need a big party to celebrate. I just need, apparently, a new lens!