Notes

Sharing the load

This week bears few scintillating accounts of life with the Richards/Simmonds clan.  To be honest, the majority of it (for me, anyway), was spent cuddling on the couch with poor little Linden, who was suffering through a double ear infection.  When we finally took him to the doctor, antibiotics turned him around incredibly quickly, but by that point, he only had one day of school anyway (Friday was a pd day).  

The rest of us were all pretty low-energy and grumpy, what with not very much sleep, and Linden sharing the cold that he had (concurrent with the ear infections). So instead of recounting our (mostly non-existent) adventures, here are some random notes from current day-to-day:

Juniper, reading a Magic Tree House book, while listening to pretend music on her hand-crafted "headphones"

 Juniper is a funny duck.  She is sweet, emotional, generous, and highly conscious and aware of the world around her.  She is also nosy, defiant, and argumentative.  She can be VERY frustrating in this regard. She has taken, recently, to informing us (defiantly) that certain things are "against the law", when we ask her to do them. Sample conversation that happened yesterday:

Tara:  Juniper, if you want to keep claiming that things are "against the law", you're going to need to take a law degree first. Right now you're just being flippant and annoying.
Juniper: What's a law degree?
Tara: It's 4 years of school that you do after university to learn all about how the law works
Juniper: Oh.  Why didn't you and daddy do that?
Clark: (piping in from the background) Because, Juniper, we both decided it would be better to go to school for a longer amount of time, and then get paid a fraction of the salary.

Hahaha (cough), sigh.

Taking turns...

...pulling each other along the snow

Both kids currently have imaginary friends that come calling sometimes.  Linden's are named "LinOliver and Lindo".  I kid you not.  Juniper's are Lucy and Lucia, and are teenagers who come for sleep-overs.  So far, these imaginary friends have not been blamed for any trouble-making, but I am on alert.  I had an imaginary friend as a child, named "Charanda" (?), who got blamed for ALL the bad things that happened. She was very handy that way.  Chances are good that Lindo and LinOliver might follow in Charanda's footsteps, and maybe even Lucy and Lucia (though they should know better, being teenagers and all).

King of the Castle!

 The other day in the car, we were listening to an Elizabeth Mitchell album that had fallen out of rotation for awhile.  I heard Linden whisper softly in the backseat "I love you so much".
"Oh, Linden!", I exclaimed, "I love you too, sweetheart!".
"I was talking to the song, mom".

Clark and kids playing a balancing game they got for Christmas

OK - that is all for now.  I am still buzzing from managing to get both kids on the bus by myself this morning.  Clark is away on a work trip for a few days, and therefore it was up to me to make sure everyone got out the door on time.  This isn't necessarily a huge feat, except that both kids slept in (and I let them, what with all the sickness of the past week).  Juniper's turn-around time was tight, and I had to send her out the door on her own, as Linden was still sleeping.  She made it with maybe a minute to spare (I know because I saw the bus drive by my window 4 minutes after she left the house, waving frantically from the window as I had instructed her to do).  Linden, on the other hand, I had given up as a pointless exercise, as he woke up 10 minutes before his bus came.  But - in a super-human push, I got him dressed, breakfasted, bundled into winter clothes, with a nice healthy lunch in his backpack, and out the door in that 10 minutes.  TEN MINUTES. We arrived at the bus stop just as the bus was pulling up.  I will graciously accept any medals that are offered.

makeshift birthday

One of the most exciting parts of any birthday! (Juniper had just been serenading me with her violin, pretending we were in a fancy restaurant, thus the bow in her hand)

This past Friday, I celebrated my 36th birthday, and I had visions of how the birthday weekend would unfold.  Nothing fancy, mind you - but it involved some long solitary walks through the woods, dinner out at a restaurant of my choosing, sleeping in, and maybe taking myself out to a movie. But, as I have learned, plans are for chumps.  Plans basically never unfold the way you imagine they might.  

Friday morning started out the way you would expect a birthday in this house to unfold: a (very simple) breakfast in bed (this is a VERY necessary component of birthdays from Juniper's perspective), and handmade birthday crown (again, all Juniper's doing), and some presents.

Unwrapping my gifts with bedhead and a crown, while precariously balancing a tray of tea and food

There were a couple of little things: a pen from Linden and a Herb magazine and chocolate from Juniper.  The piece de resistance, however, was a handmade flower press that Clark and the kids had hand-crafted secretly over the past week:

Proudly displaying the fruits of their labour

 Then, when everyone had gone off to school and work, I thought about taking myself out for the first of my snowy walks, but instead, I hunkered down for the final read-through of my thesis.  This doesn't happen often, but I was SO CLOSE to feeling like I could send it off that I was compelled to finish.  So that is, in the end, what I spent my day doing.

Anyway, before I knew it, it was time to meet Juniper at the bus.  Then I went to get Linden off of HIS bus 20 minutes later, and found him unable to physically get off the bus by himself, as he was crying miserably with a headache.  That is, a you can imagine, where all the plans started to vaporize.

Juniper sharing her Magic Tree House obsession by reading to sick Linden. 

So, in the end, it was mostly a weekend of trying to muddle through things as best as possible.  It involved a bunch of Advil (it seems as though, in the end, Linden has a bit of an ear infection, though we haven't been to the doctor yet), juggling activities (such as two OTHER birthday parties on Saturday), while keeping poor Linden at home, some not-very-good sleeps at night, and the like.

Juniper's "day of multiple birthday parties" ensemble. She felt that with the puffed sleeves, she looked very much like Anne of Green Gables   

However, I did, in the end, give myself the best birthday present of all: at 9:30pm on my actual birthday, I relinquished control of my thesis, and sent it off to my supervisor.  There is still much work left to do, but a big weight has been temporarily lifted off my shoulders, which simultaneously feels very nice, and more than a little scary.

From earlier in the week: we finally got Linden the desk he had been requesting.  He likes to use it to "write songs".

 Today, I  believe there is a lot of Paw Patrol in my future.  Linden is currently on the couch, holding his ear and exclaiming "owwww!",  with snot pouring out of his nose.  Maybe I can try and convince him to watch something a little more interesting at some point, but when you're sick, binge watching TV is one of life's only pleasures, so I will ultimately defer to his wishes.

See you next week!

Spring cleaning, and some resolutions

Hard at work at the Children's Museum

This past week was one of those strange, relatively unpleasant non-weeks. You know the kind - everything is out of sorts, nothings happens or gets done the way it's supposed to, and there is a collective sigh of relief when Sunday night draws to a close, and promises a re-do the next morning.

 For me, most of the unpleasantness had to do with the fall-out from what I assume to be ANOTHER abscessed tooth. I won't go into details, as I find it all very depressing, but suffice it to say that I spent the week in agony, while simultaneously battling the side-effects of amoxycillin.  I'll find out for sure at my endodontist appointment in a couple of days, but chances are very good that I am going to be booking in for another root canal. My grandfather was a dentist... doesn't that karmically entitle me to better teeth?  Apparently not.

Anyway, I found myself able to mostly rejoin life when the weekend hit, but sadly it was a straight 2 days of miserable, cold, driving rain.  So.  No one got the much-needed nature-based recharge we're all used to getting, and there was more than a little cabin fever.  We battled it in two ways.

1. We finally took advantage of our super-awesome Christmas present from Andrea and Dinesh: a year-long family membership to the Canadian Museum of History!  It is a grand affair, boasting (among other things) an entire Children's museum section.  Seeing as it was a miserable, rainy Saturday, it was (unfortunately) a veritable zoo, but it was absolutely the right thing to do.  I wasn't able to get many good pictures, because: a) I didn't bring the good camera, b) The whole museum was lit very darkly, and c) there was so much to see and do that no one stopped moving for any length of time. But to get a sense of things:

Some of the amazing totem poles - just as I remember them from many moons ago

First stop at the Children's Museum: the theatre.  As you can imagine, both kids spent a good chunk of time there

Costumes, pretend food, a market-place...

... and more costumes.  You could get happily lost for hours in this place.

2. We officially said good-bye to Christmas, and did some much-needed Spring Cleaning.  I know, I know - it is January, but September has always felt like my new year anyway, so technically that makes this ideal spring-cleaning season, non?  We started by composting the gingerbread house.  That didn't go so well.  Both kids cried bitterly for what seemed like an extraordinarily long time.  The next day, we took a much better-exposed family Christmas tree shot...

No weird lighting issues this time!

... put the kids to bed, and then were able to dismantle the tree without comment or tears.  To soften the inevitable blow of seeing it gone the next morning, we then hauled the piano upstairs to take its place (not an easy feat, I assure you). I had been planning to do this anyway, as Linden has now started to take lessons, and I wanted it front and centre for practising.

Practising learning his fingers

Then, the next day, the whole family put away all the rest of the decorations, reorganized furniture, and cleaned.  It was, I must say, all very satisfying.

Both kids took their cloth folding duties very seriously.

And finally, I will leave you with some of the kids' New Years "resolutions".  I explained what the term meant as best I could, and then asked the kids if they had any for the coming year.  The list was very long on both sides, but I included a few highlights:

Juniper
"I want to run faster, and get good at being a soccer goalie"
"I want to go to New Brunswick"
"I want to read ALL of the Magic Tree House series"
"I want to do more and more violin lessons, and never stop"

Linden (slightly more esoteric)
"I like watching stars in the car" (?)
"I want to make paper airplanes, and wands, and climb trees"
"I like soccer teams and soccer socks, but I haven't done a soccer team yet, so I want to do that"
"I love playing in the dirt and in the snow with flashlights, and also building snowmen.  So I want to do more of that"
"I want to do more construction projects with daddy"

I still have no pithy resolutions or insights of my own, so I will leave things there. Perhaps I should be checking out those stars in the car.  Have a great week!

(Happy) NEW! (Year)

Linden loves (LOVES) shovelling the driveway.  Good thing we didn't pony up for snow ploughing!

It is now officially the dawn of a new year.  I will not write about resolutions or aspirations, because I did not take time to sort all that out, truth be told.  But with that having been said, I think (hope) 2016 will mark some exciting changes, for me at least... so I feel rather optimistic.  Plus, as the photos will reveal, Ottawa has officially transitioned into winter this past week, and it all feels lovely.  Sorry, snow haters - this little family has been revelling!

It feels a little surreal to be jumping back into reality this morning -- the kids were unceremoniously shuffled off to school, Clark is back at work, and I have a little over 300 pages of thesis to read through before sending a full draft off to my supervisor (!).  But this past full week of vacation was tremendously fun, and I have absolutely no complaints.  It was marked (at least photographically) by three main events.

1. Surprise visit from Grandpa and Grandma!
Clark's dad and stepmom stopped by for a full day on their way from St. Catherine's (ON), back to the farm in NB.  It was a bit of a last-minute decision, and was an incredibly nice surprise.  Not only did we get to see them, but they decided to treat themselves to a lovely hotel room, which meant a whole lot of pool and hot-tubbing.  Oh, and they also brought the first legitimate snow storm of the season with them, so all-in-all, a grand time was had by all!

Warming up with grandma after a thorough romp in the snow

I went on a solo (and very epic) snowshoe adventure from our house to the hotel, mid-storm. Amazing.

This is what I missed out on in the process, but I'm not complaining!

2. New Year's chez Judith and Simon

We were invited to the sleepover of the year - New Year's Eve with our dear friends Judith and Simon, at their gorgeous house nestled in the hills of Gatineau.  There was a whole lot of fun socializing, constant delicious food, and some extreme outdoor play. It was, in short, the perfect way to ring in the new year.

Two tired boys in matching black long johns

No visit is complete without a bit of a string duet

Linden was obsessed with cracking and eating nuts.  This is his nut-cracking face.

The whole gang!

I couldn't NOT include this picture.  Just look at our expressions!

3. SNOWSHOEING!

We are a family who loves our nature walks, and it was oh-so-satisfying to travel our tried-and-true trails on... snowshoes!  The kids each got a pair for Christmas, and Clark and have had ours tucked away for a good few years now, so it was even more exciting than you would think to go on a a full afternoon's outing this past weekend.  I predict we'll have these babies out a whole lot this winter!

thug life

not-so-thug life

This is how beautiful it was the whole entire time

hot chocolate break under the bridge!

Group shot!

exhausted

And now we get down to business.  I hope the new year has started out as wonderfully for you all as it has for us!  Maybe next week I'll have had time to ponder the new year in a bit more detail.  I'll fill you in if I come up with anything particularly pithy or revealing.