My mom fail moment

Anyone who knows Alex knows that she's never had much hair. She was 2 before I could even attempt putting teeny tiny elastics in. And now, at almost 3, she has enough hair for a small ponytail.

The lack of hair is not because we've been cutting it short. In fact, recently, someone asked me how old she was when she first had a haircut. My answer? Um....never. Which is not entirely true -- she's had her bangs cut by me 4 times since her second birthday.

And this is where my mom fail moment comes in. (Side note to my mom, I think you know where this story is going...because you've been there.)

Last night, after her bath, I decided she needed her bangs cut again. They were long and stragly and she was constantly sweeping them out of her eyes. So out came the scissors.

A minute or so later, her bangs were cut -- not quite straight and a little too short. Ok, a lot too short. I'd done it three other times over the last year, but this time, I failed. Quite badly.

Maybe I can get some barrettes and clip her bangs back every morning until they grow out a bit. (Yeah, like she'll leave those in all day long.)

Or maybe I should just take her to the hairdresser for a proper haircut.

A rhetorical question

When did this:

 become this:

It's a rhetorical question because I know the answer is over the last 5 years. But seriously? Five? When did that happen? How did that happen?

Happy Birthday to my 5-year-old!

Wordless Wednesday: How many more months 'til summer?

On the first school snow day in Toronto in 12 years (and this is not the time or place to debate whether there's really enough snow out there to merit a snow day), I figure this is the perfect opportunity to remember (or dream of) summer. This was the kids, last July, playing in the wading pool.

And on that note, I must go shovel the driveway again.

(At least the kids are having fun playing in the snow.)

'I can do it myself'

Alex is way more independent than Austin has ever been. Don't get me wrong, Austin is very much a do-it-himself kind of kid. But Alex, just takes that attitude and takes it to the next level.

To date, everything she has learned to do by herself, she has learned to do earlier than Austin -- for the sole reason that Austin can already do it. I mean, she learned to walk at 10 months mainly because Austin could get up and run out of a room and she wanted to be able to do the same thing.

So last fall, she learned how to dress herself. As early as September (so before she was even 2 and a half), I have been able to tell her to go get dressed. And she does. And she does with such gutso that she doesn't want anyone to help her.

This results in two things. The first is that her clothes don't always match. At first, I had an issue with this. I'd drag her back to her room to change a shirt or a pair of pants because the thought of her going out with pink pants and a red shirt was embarassing. And then it suddenly dawned on me -- why? Why bother? Why fight her about it.

So I pick the fights that matter. Like the time in early October she insisted on wearing a summer dress and sandals. So as a compromise, I made her wear a t-shirt and leggings undernearth. And socks. Hence, we had this look as we took Austin to school:

 It's not bad really. And honestly, who is she hurting. So I let it go. Some days it's dresses, some days it's rainboots when it's sunny outside. Whatever.

Lately, it's backward shirts. You see, she puts her own shirts on, but sometimes it goes on with the print on her front, and other times it goes on with the print on her back. The fun part of this is that she knows she's doing it. She almost does it on pupose. She comes running out of her room now, a big grin on her face and says to me "mommy, it's backwards day!" And for the rest of the day, regardless of where we go, she looks like this:

I've had some funny looks from people. And some people have actually come up to me when we're out and say "you know her shirt is on backwards". Yup, I always answer....and she's so damn proud of it.

A squish on your basement carpet is never a good thing

Tuesday was a balmy 4C outside. And when I was leaving my house at 8:30 a.m. with the kids, I heard a strange sound. But being in a rush, I didn't think much of it.

At 12:30, when the kids and I returned home for lunch, I again heard this sound. And again, I didn't think much of it. After all, I had two hungry mouths to feed.

So we went inside, I quickly slapped together some peanut butter and jam sandwiches for the kids and then ran downstairs to get more milk out of the basement fridge. And when I stepped off the bottom step onto the carpeted basement floor, my foot went squish.

And so I took another step. And it too went squish.

And it suddenly dawned on me what that strange sound was. A tap. A tap turned on all the way. I ran outside and discovered that the tap that was turned on all the way was my neighbour's. And in between his tap and my house was a huge lake.

I turned his tap off, swore a couple a dozen times and went back down to my basement. Squish, squish, squish with each step I took. The water wasn't coming from the wall next to the stairs as I first thought because the deeper into the basement I walked, the more my feet squished.And so I opened the door to the closet under the stairs and found where the water was coming from. There was about an inch of water in there. What didn't fit, had spilled out across the basement.

By this point, the kids had wandered downstairs to see what all the swearing was for. Here's Alex standing in our closet under the stairs (taken in case we need photos for insurance).
Now that's a lot of water! In a place that shoudn't have any water.The first thing I did was shoo the kids back upstairs. The next thing I did was call Ryan at work. I followed his "Hello" with "We have water. A lot of water."

He was able to come home about an hour and a half later and by that time I had managed to get everything out of the closet and use our little wet vac to suck out the pool of water. It's a big closet -- we joke that it's our Harry Potter closet because it really is big enough to put a bed in (at least big enough for a toddler bed). There was a lot of stuff in there (unfortunately) but (fortunately) most of it is in Rubbermaid bins. Ryan's comic book collection was in there -- but fortunately for him (or maybe that's unfortunately for me) the carboard boxes they were in were wet on the outside but still dry on the inside.

Once Ryan got home, he decided that our little wet vac couldn't cut this mess and he went to Home Depot to rent an industrial one.

Six hours and about 80 litres of water later, the carpet was still wet, very wet, but at least it didn't squish when we walked on it.

Now we've ripped up two ends of the carpet and have two carpet blowers trying to dry it out. Only then will we be able to figure out if anything been damaged.

As for my neighbours, we knocked on their door and they came over to chat with us about it. They felt horrible and have offered to pay for any damages. They don't know how the tap ended up on -- it was probably left on by accident and was frozen until yesterday morning.

And what's left is this: the entire contents of my storage closet is spread out across my basement, my carpet is ripped up in two places, it sounds like a wind tunnel in here with the fans and oh yeah, there's a tiny crack somewhere in my foundation that lets water in. Fun times.

The first rule of book club...

...don't talk about book club.

I have just a few followers who will 'get' this statement but I had to use it anyway.

Years ago, when we were young and didn't yet have kids (and therefore had much more time on our hands than we do now), a group of us girls formed a book club. It was a book club in the loosest of terms. We'd pick a book that we'd all read, and most of us would read most of it.

Then we'd get together for a potluck at someone's house, talk about the book -- for sometimes no more than 5 minutes, but longer if it was a good book -- and then we'd sit around, gossip, eat, drink (sometimes too much) and just have a good time.

Then we'd repeat. So really, it was an excuse for a girls night.

I don't remember how many books we read -- or even how many years we met for -- but we read some good books in our book club days. Time Travellers' Wife, In her Shoes, Oryx and Crake, Skinny Legs and All that. And some not so good books. (What were we thinking when we chose Anna Karinina!)

The don't talk about book club line actually came from one of our spouses. He didn't want to hear us talking about books when we weren't at book club (which a few of us would often do).

But over time, our time for book club became less and less, in that we all had less and less time to get together, and they eventually just petered out.

But I've always loved reading. Before we first got together, during the time we did book club, and since then, reading is something I've always loved to do. I don't get as much time to do it as I used to (gee, I wonder why?) and reading is usually restricted to the 20 minutes or so before I go to sleep every night.

I have bookcases full of books -- many of them read that I can't bear to part with and others that I haven't yet got to.

So here's my 2011 reading challenge -- to read as many of the ones I haven't got to as I can without buying anymore new books. You see, that's why I have so many I haven't yet read -- because I'm a sucker for bookstores, especially used bookstores. Some girls can't walk by a shoe store without going in; well I can't walk by a used book store without going in and buying four or five books. The hardest part of this reading challenge will be the fact that on my new ipad, I downloaded the Kobo reader app -- and I'm just dying to buy an ebook and try it out (and I might just have to bend my rule for that, afterall, it's not technically buying a book that will sit on my shelf.)

I started a new feature on the side of this blog a few weeks ago -- links to books I've read and to the book (or books) I'm reading now. The books I've read section is not complete, in the sense that I can't be bothered to go through my actual bookshelf and post it all on my virtual one. But it has much of what I read in 2010 and it'll have all that I read in 2011.

When I finish a book, I'll post a brief review -- nothing fancy, just a few lines. I'll keep it short and sweet, just like we did in our book club days. It's my way of having my own little book club with anyone who feels like checking it out. And if no one checks it out, well, it's still my own little book club.

And if any of my old book club friends reading this ever want to start book club again, you know where to find me. And then I'll promise not to break the first rule of book club anymore.

Wordless Wednesday: sleigh ride to school

(Well almost wordless -- it's hard for the writer in me to be wordless!) What was supposed to be just a couple of centimetres of snow overnight turned into at least 10 cm up by my house. So this was Alex's chariot so that we could take Austin to school this morning. (I actually took this photo near the school, where a little shovelling had been done. The rest of the walk was through unploughed sidewalks and across unploughed streets.)


The sled made getting through the snow almost easy -- except when Austin got tired of trudging through the snow and wanted to ride. Then, I was pulling 75 pounds through the snow. Let's just say I won't need to go to the gym if this keeps up.