Category: Kids
Friday, Dec 26, 2008 | Kids, Local Food |
We ate, and we ate, and we ate.
For breakfast, sticky buns with pecans. Homemade. Oh, the butter.
For lunch … well, there was no lunch. There was snacking on oranges from the stockings, chocolate from the stockings, candy from the stockings. What was Santa thinking?
And then, there was a late afternoon simple feast. One 19-pound turkey (from Nina’s buying club) survived my first attempt at roasting turkey. Bread stuffing on the side. Wild rice and barley casserole with turnips and sweet potatoes. Organic greens with grated carrot, apples, sunflower seeds, and honey/balsamic dressing. Homemade pumpkin pie for dessert.
This was the most Christmassy-feeling Christmas in awhile, and the children and their excitement and participation were a huge part of that. Albus and Apple-Apple’s sweet and thoughtful gifts. Waiting, then running downstairs yesterday morning together to see whether Christmas had come. Working on the 1,000 piece puzzle. Just holing up together with warmth and food while snow fell. Music. Piano playing and singing. Retelling the nativity story. Peaceful sleep. Sledding with friends on Christmas day. Jammies all day. Napping.
Tuesday, Dec 23, 2008 | Kids |
First, there are a few photos from our first Christmas celebration on the parallel blog; link at right. Second, the photos fail to show all the illness that abounded amidst our crew, but do catch the overall happy and relaxed vibe. It was nice to be sick and have nothing else to do. No cooking. No laundry. No nothing. We checked into the hotel with the rest of the Cairns family and nobody seemed bothered by all the nothing we were doing, together.
Grandma Alice and I took the two older children to the National Ballet’s Nutcracker at the new Opera House in Toronto. Amazing. I was moved to tears at one point by the sheer beauty and grace of the scene before us. All that intense work and effort and artistry to create something that can’t be held in the hand, or consumed, or made into anything else. It made me feel that art really matters, that it feeds the spirit and the soul in ways that can’t be explained. Afterwards, I asked Albus what he thought of the show, and he replied, dead serious, “I didn’t really like the dancing.” Well. That doesn’t leave much left over at a ballet! But he liked the soldiers and fighting scenes (of course). Apple-Apple would comment of a particular costume or dancer during the performance, “She’s soooo beautiful,” and then tune out moments later. Lots of wriggling. We were in the cheap seats and it seemed an extra-excited wriggle might send one plunging miles downward to one’s death. Apple-Apple assured me she’d land on the people directly below us instead.
Other highlights: CJ practicing standing all over the place. He’s really found his core balance and wants to be upright and unsupported. No steps yet. Kevin and I taking a nap with CJ while the big kids hung out in Grandma Alice’s room. Eating really really good food. Santa in the hotel lobby. Lunch with an old friend. The big kids reading chapter books, everywhere: at the restaurant, before bed, in the middle of the morning. Children running freely between our room and Grandma Alice’s room. Watching the older children’s independence bloom. Fireworks out our hotel window on the longest night of the year. Safe driving despite “Snowmaggedon.” Family.
Kids’ highlights: Albus: Present-opening. Reading. Apple-Apple: Yah! Reading. Fooey: Presents.
Tuesday, Dec 16, 2008 | Chores, Kids, Sleep |
There’s something about lack of sleep that puts me in the blog-mood. My baby will not sleep at night, and apparently is also refusing to sleep during the day. He’s in the sling right now, lazily chewing my hair and stuffing banana-scented fingers up my nose with a look of supreme exhaustion upon his gorgeous features, hanging on by the sheerest of threads to consciousness. Of course, if he does decide to fall asleep, I will have to wake him up anyway to get to Fooey’s afternoon “recital” at her music class.
But it’s my own sleep deprivation, not his, that makes me want to type. I’m too tired to analyze the whys and wherefores, though I’m sure something applies. I was up approximately once an hour last night with this child. He refuses to nurse during the day unless he’s beyond starving and nothing like a banana is in sight, yet at night he seeks milky comfort to lull him back to dreamland … last night I saw midnight, 2am, 4am, 5am, 6am; those were the ams I recall seeing, anyway. By 7am the whole house was up, woken by Apple-Apple’s surprise nosebleed. Did I mention we also had a child, who shall remain nameless, pee on top of the toilet lid last night? That was my second unexpected opportunity of the evening to really clean the bathroom. The first followed a series of reckless baths. I’d no idea what had rolled under our tub since the last flood. Apple-Apple asked whether I’d found a dead mouse. Nope, just a giant fuzzy hairball.
You can thank me for that image later.
I’ve just laid CJ down, awake, protesting but weak. If he falls into sleep now, I’ll be dragging him out of dreamland in, oh, twenty-seven minutes or so. I run on precision timing.
Was just packing the diaper bag for aforementioned outing, and discovered an old cloth diaper lingering, shall we say, in one of those handy stuff sacs. Maybe we’ll go disposable just for this event. At the rate this day is going, I anticipate solids arriving somewhere mid-performance. And no, he’s still awake. His howls just took on real drama. Twenty minutes till departure.
I’m going to go pick him up now.
Sunday, Dec 14, 2008 | Kids, Photos, Swimming |
Above. I was trying to capture the moment on Tuesday when Fooey was sick and CJ was wearing an old pink sweater that used to belong to Apple-Apple, and we were hanging on the couch. In anticipation of the flash, CJ kept blinking, and Fooey had a hard time taking her thumb out of her mouth.
I love photographs on other people’s blogs. But other people are genuinely good photographers; I’ve got words and not much else for talents. Nevertheless. I’m all for experimenting, so here goes.
So last night, to celebrate the last swim lessons of the term (semi-successful results: one passed, one was magnanimous, and one was oblivious), we got take-out sushi and olive bread and cheese and salami from a new neighbourhood store, and we enjoyed a truly happy supper, relaxed, conversational, Friday-ish. Fooey insisted on having her picture taken, so we went around the table and got everyone. Satiated.
Saturday, Dec 13, 2008 | Kids |
Christmas preparations …
We promised to hang up some decorations today, so the kids got themselves up and dressed and started cleaning the house before we’d crawled out of bed this morning. There was a lot to clean. Too much. So they ran out of steam. But I loved that they tried and that it was of their own inspiration.
The house got cleaned. I was on an efficient adrenalin rush, and it happened.
We put up the tree. You plug it in and it spins and glows fibre-optically. We had it in the attic, and the kids longed to use it rather than cutting down a real tree. So it’s kinda environmentally friendly, right? As long as we don’t turn it on. Then they took turns decorating it. It’s small and sits on a table, doesn’t fit a lot of decorations. There was fighting. So each, in turn, got to take the ornaments off and put them on again. Apple-Apple and I went out to do some gifty shopping (almost done!!!), and we finally bought a creche scene complete with rustic stable at Ten Thousand Villages, and we found a colourful unbreakable wooden 18-piece scene. I’ve been meaning to add this to our pretty minimal Christmas box. And how lovely that the kids can play with the scene and retell the story. Except they spent about 15 minutes screaming at each other over it as soon as Apple-Apple and I got home … SIGH. When I tried to initiate a conversation about the meaning of Christmas (“What is Christmas about …? Don’t worry there’s not a wrong answer …”), Apple-Apple remembered Jesus’s birthday (my little Sunday School darling!), and Albus piped up with “Getting gifts.” “What’s the opposite of that,” I asked, transparently leading the conversation, and he said, with a little sigh, “Giving gifts,” and then brightened up as he cleverly thought of another option, “Not getting gifts is the real opposite!” Okay, yah, you’re right, kiddo, but … Thus ended the chat, though I did get in a bit about sharing and kindness and peace and joy before Apple-Apple started shrieking again about how unfair Life is, et cetera.
Tuesday, Dec 9, 2008 | Kids |
Why is it so satisfying, when feeding a baby, to scrape the extra stuff off his chin with a spoon? This morning I said to Kevin, who was spooning the mash into him: “You could feed him another meal with what’s on his chin.” People who are not parents might be grossed out by this thought, however.
You know your housekeeping standards have really fallen when (this could be one in an ongoing series): Your baby has taken to snacking off the kitchen floor.
Read a story in the Globe today about a Fisher-Price talking baby doll that apparently says: “Islam is the light.” Wouldn’t you know, we have this very doll, given to Fooey for her third birthday by her auntie Fi. So, naturally, I turned it on (it’s usually off; it has the unnerving habit, when on, to randomly and mechanically wriggle about like an actual cooing, fussing, gurgling baby, of which we are already in possession). And lo and behold, one of the random babbles does sound eerily like “Islam is the light.” Unless it actually sounds like “God is the light.” Or even “Please turn on/off the light.” Apparently there is an outcry (from whom?) to recall these dolls lest they subliminally convert the innocent. From my unscientific exploration of the subject, I’m not sure to what one might fear conversion. If the doll could subliminally get my kids to turn out their lights at night, I’d keep the button “on.”
