happy new year

"save the last dance for me"

New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights. ~Hamilton Wright Mabie

technorati tags:new, year, mabie, quote, dance

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sense of accomplishment

Well, I finally did it. I grouted the kitchen backsplash tile. It's only been waiting to be done for, oh, I don't know, 6 months? :P

It feels good to look at it and know that it's finally done, but being the perfectionist I am, I see the mistakes I made and the sections that don't look that good. I think I might have to redo them. Of course, I don't have any more grout powder left, so I'll have to get more just to do that... oh well.

anyway, cross something off the list (semi-cross, I still have to caulk and seal it... and mabe redo it... hee hee)

wow, can you believe it, it's 2007 on Monday. That means it will be 10 years of wedded bliss! :) Amazing.

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vienna

i've been trying out vienna this week for aggregating my news feeds, and so far I like it. It kind of looks like iTunes for RSS. check it out, it runs on OS X, and best of all it's free. And then you can subscribe to my blog and get all instantaneously updated and stuff. cuz you know I'm the coolest. LOL

technorati tags:vienna, rss, newsreader

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kicking

T had a 101F temperature last night. At 12:30, which doesn't sound that late, but when we just went to sleep at 11:30... grrr. Not a jolly time. N goes to get her, and she comes and sleeps with us. Which, until she settles down, is a lot of head butting N and kicking me in the stomach / back... depending on which way I'm lying.

Let's just say I was a little tired today, and N even more so.

On the other hand, T slept the latest of all of us (7:20), had a 2 hour afternoon nap, and was full of energy and happy all day. Ah, kids...

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perpetuating the myth

So we survived another Christmas, and I say that in the best way possible. Because Christmas Eve was on a Sunday this year, we had a pretty busy day and evening. After evening service, we drove home the 'scenic' route, both to ensure the kids fell asleep, and also to pass by Nathan Phillips and the Bay Christmas windows. They did a Narnia theme this year for the windows, and while they were cool, they were not that interesting for little ones, nor were they particularly Christmas-y. J made it to just past the windows before passing out. T took a litlle longer, but was safely asleep by the time we got home. By that I mean she could be moved without waking her. She's a super light sleeper, so if we're not careful, we can wake her up if we take her out of the car at the wrong point during her sleep. Which kind of sucks.

Anyway J had been talking all week about putting out some milk and cookies for Santa. She wanted to do it on Monday already! When I asked her where she got the idea from, she said she saw it on TV. Good old TV. Anyway, we decided that we would perpetuate the myth this year. Previously, it hadn't really come up, because they were either too young, and we had just moved, and Christmas was still kind of a new thing in the kids' consciousness. Anyway. This year, we did it right. J made a cookie for Santa in her kids program. She had written a note to Santa last week, which read:

FROM J. H.

SANTA I WOULD LIKE A BLASTER

Hm. Ok. By "Blaster" she means one of those big water guns, that everytime she saw in Superstore her Grandpa said, "Hey look, a blaster!" to which she responded with gales of laughter. We're not big on letting them play with weapons: toys or otherwise. So how to respond? Well, I decided that Santa would leave J a note, explaining why no blaster, thanking her for the cookie (which I found to be sweet, covered in sprinkles and frosted, but lacking in the necessary chocolate to take it over the top), and wishing her a Merry Christmas and so forth.

Christmas morning we awoke, and surprisingly, the kids were not chomping at the bit to go down and open the presents. I expect that will change as they get older. Anyway, as we went down, I led J over to the table, where I had placed her note next to Santa's note, and the empty cookie plate. I read her the note, and then we opened Santa's present and looked in their stockings at what Santa brought.

According to my wife, we are reversing their family tradition, which was to have the 'big present' be from Santa. We are having the stocking stuffers be from Santa, and the bigger gifts be from us. This year they got books and scissors and a "Lucky Ducks" game from Santa. Maybe this way they won't put so much expectation on what Santa might bring... and not get too excited or disappointed, either way. We'll see.

The greater issue is what we say about Santa to our kids, and how long we keep up the myth? I'm guessing that it won't last for too too long, although I was surprised that J was so into it. I thought she would be more skeptical, since she seems to be so analytical about everything. However, she had little to ask about Santa. I thought she would ask how it was possible, or how he would get in the house, etc. She did ask N what would happen if Santa had to go downstairs to the basement to use the bathroom, which is a totally J kind of oddball question to ask...

The even greater issue is, I wonder if we give more thought to how to explain Santa, than we give to how to explain faith? Without making everything all "Christian-y", but actively engaging life with faith, living with a radical transformed perspective? Living an alternative life-style to the world's in the world, rather than creating for ourselves alternatives that are out of the world.

well, it seems that my little blog break is over, J has awoken from a very good and very rare nap. Cheers!

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merry christmas

Merry Christmas!

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me have that?

To most parents, this is a common question asked time and again by their toddlers. For us, when T asks us it's usually when we've brought something to the table to eat. As she's getting older (2.2 yrs) there's a lot more things she asks about. The other day, we set down taco shells on the dining table and she said, "Me have that?" "Yes, T, you can have that." "Yay!!" It makes us happy when she can say yay.

Increasingly, there are things that she cannot eat that we are eating, although we usually try to be really good about it, and our whole family just eats safe things. Breakfast (lots of bread/wheat and dairy containing things) and eating out are the worst.

Oh, speaking of eating out, N and I tried a ramen noodle place today that I had heard about on CBC Radio 1, of all places: Ajisen Ramen. Must say, very nice. Very nice broth, noodles were chewy, and the "ngow-lam" was tender and squishy and glutinous. (Sounds gross but you know what I mean... it was good) One of our rare days off together, so that was a nice treat. We did our last minute shopping, a few gifts, but mostly for ourselves :0 (groceries at T&T & Dominion, housewares/kitchen stuff at Cayne's). Christmas dinner is at our house this year, since it's just easier for us to make stuff that is safe for T. Not that it's all that, but we are having leg of lamb this year (yay! my favourite) and we needed a roasting rack... not to mention the leg of lamb itself.

So Christmas dinner, we don't have to say "no" to T when the food comes out. We can just relax and give her anything we're serving. And that's really nice. Being able to let your guard down a bit, it's a good thing. Especially at Christmas!

technorati tags:allergy, food, T&T, lamb, CBC, Ajisen

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how to?

When I first started this blog I felt as though each post was like an email to no one in particular. Now I feel like each post is going to real people, some I know, and some who I don't. (Hi out there!) I'm hopeful that you will each find something interesting or useful from my experiences.

I see from my blogger dashboard that this is my 70th post, which means I have equaled the number of posts on my photoblog. Cool.

I was wondering how you read blogs. Do you use the RSS subscribe feed? A feed reader? Or do you just keep bookmarks / links? Links on your own page to blogs you read?

I have been using Flock's newsreader feature to aggregate all the blogs I read into one page, that gets automatically updated whenever there's a new post. It's cool, and convenient, but I don't really discover new blogs this way. I tried the "next blog" button, but it's kind of random (ok, it's totally random LOL) and sometimes i get nasty stuff, or stuff in not-english, or pre-teen asian girls who typ lk dis and tak abt der FRENS a LOT.

SO how do you go about finding new and amazing blogs?

if you haven't seen CRASH, don't read on [spoiler]

Something's been bugging me about the movie Crash. Not the Cronenberg movie, the 2004 Paul Haggis film. In the film, there's a poignant moment when the girl saves her father with her invisible protective cape from the crazed shop owner. When I watched this scene, I was filled with emotion. Not only because I have daughters, but also because of the incredibly fortunate set of circumstances that saved this guy's life. When it is revealed that the bullets the daughter of the shop keeper bought for her father are blanks, there is a collective exhale, and everything makes sense. What I want to know is, are blanks always sold in red boxes? Because if they are, and I knew that she bought blanks when she asked for the bullets in the red box, that whole moment would be so much less potent. See, now you know why you shouldn't be reading this if you haven't already watched the movie! Is the director banking on the potential audience of his film to be made up of people who are gun illiterate, city dwelling types like me? Or are blanks sold in any kind of box, and the red colour was just something thrown in there?

Anyway, it's a really good movie... now that I've totally ruined that part of it for you... :(

a little slice of life at Christmastime

in a mellow tone

I taught my two daughters this song one day, just do-be-do-bah-baah... now when they hear the recording they go "do-be-do-bah-bah". I love it.

you know you're older when...

- you scrunch up your forehead, and the wrinkle actually stays wrinkled for an appreciable amount of time
- you think of people in their early 20's as 'still young' or 'just kids' :)
- you and the bank own a lovely home
- you start saying things like "little lady":p

christmas lights

We put up some outdoor Christmas lights this afternoon. After we got home from church, T was asleep in the car, so I stayed with her, while J went in with mom. I am happy to say I dozed as well, which was very nice, having stayed up till past 1AM to put the finishing touches on my message today. Hope it went well. I thought it went alright.

Anyway, J has been pestering me all week to put up our lights, and I had put her off until the weekend, simply because I was too busy and it was too dark to do it, usually, when she was asking to. So today was the big day.

And I have to complain about the eavestrough clips that I bought to string up lights... junk! They don't stay on the edge of the gutter, they just fell off. And they didn't screw onto the end of a broomstick like advertised either. Or maybe my broomstick wasn't skinny enough. In any case, after several failed attempts to hang the lights up from the eavestroughs, I gave up and we went with Plan B. J remarked, "This is a lot more complicated than I thought it would be." We strung them through the iron hand rail up the steps to our place, and lay them across the top of the porch wall. Simple. Fun. Nice. J was a great helper. I said that we were going to feed the lights through the rail, and she tried to understand the usage of 'feed' in that context...

There are a lot of things in the English language that are so different, or difficult, that it's a wonder we can speak at all. But if you grow up with it, you learn by exposure. You just grok it somehow. The amazing thing about J is that she's able to understand things like expressions. How something means something other than what it says. Like "going out to take the air" (found in a Madeline book) means going out for a walk, essentially. Or "raining cats and dogs". Or "feed this line through here".

And T is following hard on her sister's tail. Not that she understands expressions, but she'll repeat everything J says after her. She has the 1-2 buckle my shoe rhyme down. She has trouble saying "construction paper"... it comes out like "strunk-shun paper" or "strunken paper". Most requested car song is "tzena tzena". If she hears something she likes she'll say "I love that song!" But if she doesn't, now she says "Me love not this song".

N and I were commenting the other day that it's only fitting that we have two children that love to talk. We reminisced that we were always getting into trouble at school for talking in class, so it's only fair that our kids are the same. We were hoping that at least one of them would be a little quieter, but alas, it is not to be. :) Not that I'd change a thing.

actually

T says "Actually" a lot. As in, "What would you like for breakfast?" "Me want Rice Krispies, actually." or "That's my toothbrush, actually."