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!