tick tock

Today I made the mistake of mentioning... in front of other people... that I have a clock in my bathroom. Apparently this is not normal. I had no idea. I'm the Mom of smallish children, so it makes perfect sense to me.

Picture it... it's early morning and all four of us are attempting to get out the door and off to work and school. We live in a 100 year old house that has one bathroom so there's a lot of juggling and side stepping that goes on in an average morning. And of course there is always someone who can't find their water bottle or left shoe or their agenda or they have a trip form that absolutely has to go back today Mom!! All that adds up to me being the last to use the bathroom, which I do with one eye on the clock because I usually get there seven to three minutes before we're due to walk out the door so I have to make every minute count.

I've also been heard to yell from the bathroom inconveniently placed in the exact middle of the house... Okay guys, we have to be out the door in 8 minutes does everyone have their stuff? Shoes on? Grab a sweater, do you have a sweater? This happens every time we are getting ready to leave the house.

So to me, a clock in the bathroom just makes sense. I can't be the only one who thinks so..... who's with me? Do you have a clock in your bathroom?

things that make you go hmmmm

Last night Grandma Linda and I had dinner out at our new favourite restaurant where the pulled pork sandwich is scrumptious, but I opted to try the tamale pie and I am so glad I did. It was awesome on a plate.

While we were eating dinner I couldn't help, but notice the couple sitting at the next table. They were my age-ish and had already been served their food. I am assuming they were a married couple as I noticed wedding bands. The odd thing was they were both engrossed in their reading. Him a very thick novel and her a very wordy magazine. I don't think they exchanged one word the entire time we sat there. I couldn't tell if I felt sorry for them because they didn't appear to have anything to talk about or whether I thought they were awesome for being so comfortable in their relationship.

I will admit Mike and I and the kids have done that at home. All of us with books or magazines or homework or colouring. But I can't say it's happened at a restaurant. Now I'm curious, have you ever done anything like that?

pure awesome

I have always loved to read and nothing made me happier twenty plus years ago than to crack the spine on a new Sweet Valley High book. This series was all the rage back in the day. So imagine my surprise and utter delight when I stumbled upon this article.

Oh my gosh, she's written a "10 years later" book. I am not even going to try and hide my excitement about that. I will for sure be picking up a copy on March 29th!

Did you read Sweet Valley High? Who was your favourite twin? Or did you have another favourite series?

fall

So it's September... boy did that sneak up on me. I can't believe Abby's going back to school on Tuesday. Even more surprising, I've yet to have a single moment of anxiety about it. I guess I've finally outgrown it. Phew!

September means fall and I love fall. I think it's my favourite season. There is nothing like a cool fall day. This year September is packed full of all sorts of fun stuff. We are already booked for every single Saturday, from now right into October. That is truly awesome for a social butterfly like myself. I am looking forward to birthday parties, Maya's 1st day of school, meet the teacher night, the first council meeting of the year, jammie movie night, the fair and a family wedding - that I have a good authority will have the cutest flower girl ever. Hint - she lives with us and her name is Maya. Her older sister lives with us too... her name is currently "jealous".

What are you looking forward to this fall?

can i ask you a question?

Well the fair is just around the corner and I've been busy trying to get my entries ready for the various categories I'll be trying my luck at. I'm actually going to throw caution to the wind and attempt a couple of advanced photography categories. The one is portrait - black and white and I'm stuck on which of these two I should enter. I know which one I'm leaning towrds, but am curious to hear what you guys think.

This one...



or this one..



Or this one... which is the same shot as above, but without the soft focus...

i wanna know - what's your favourite tradition?

We have lots of traditions and I've really been working on introducing some more to the holiday season this year. We have some that are from my childhood, like getting new jammies to open on Christmas Eve. Some that are new, like the 25 days of Christmas with Elwood. Traditions are the best part of Christmas and I know that's what the girls will take away from the holidays as they grow older. They'll remember Elwood and decorating cookies and gingerbread houses. Papa reading the night before Christmas. And Christmas Eve service at church.

So what I wanna know is...

What's your favourite family tradition?

i wanna know - how is your christmas shopping coming?

The state of my bank account has forced me to become creative in my Christmas shopping this year. I've really been thinking outside the box for low or no cost gift giving ideas. It's not as easy as one would think. Gone are the days of being able to make a macaroni necklace for Mom that leaves a trail of glitter behind it. It's cute when you're five, but not so much when you're thirty-five.

I love to Christmas shop and pride myself on picking great gifts. It's easy for me to walk into a store or surf the world wide web and spend spend spend on the ones I love. It just doesn't make sense to do that this year. Not with so much economic uncertainty. Not when our business had such a horrendously bad year.

It's been interesting and fun brainstorming gift ideas.... with myself, because 98% of all Christmas related decisions are up to me. Plus when I first mentioned this idea to Michael his response was, "that just screams we're poor." So there was no help there, in the beginning anyway. After thinking about it for a day or two he came to see it for the true gift it could be. No less thought has gone into my "free gifts" as has in the past to my purchased gifts. It's just using a different skill set. It's making the gift much more personal because, bottom line, it's a gift of myself in some way. Using one of my "talents" or offering my time.

I know I'm being rather vague and this actually began in my head as a potpourri type post, but somehow this no cost gift giving idea kind of took over. I'd love to tell you the ideas I've come up with, but my family reads this.... hi Mom..... hi Grandma Linda...... so I gotta keep the actual gifts on the DL. I can tell you that I am very excited about what I've come up with.

Now I know it hasn't been that long since we did an I Wanna Know, but I'm interested.

I wanna know.......

What, if any, changes are you making to your Christmas shopping this year?

i wanna know - what didn't you get for christmas?

It's that time of year isn't it? If we haven't already started Christmas shopping, we're certainly thinking about it. As I was flipping through The Sears Wish Book (a Christmas standard) I couldn't help, but remember being hunched over it as a child carefully making a list of the toys I wanted Santa to bring me.

I remember wanting a Connect 4 game, but I never got one. My best friend in grade school had one and I thought it was the best thing ever. I wanted one of my own very badly, but every year Santa shot me down. I'm sure we all have a similar story to that so.....

What I wanna know is.....

What did you really want for Christmas when you were a kid, but never got?

i wanna know - what do i do with my fussy eaters?

I live with fussy eaters. Well Mike's okay, for the most part, but the girls are a whole other story. The thing is Abby used to be a pretty good eater. When she was a baby she was more than willing to try whatever we offered her. And then came Maya, who takes fussy eating to a whole new level. At least for this house. And she seems to have passed it along to her sister.

Maya actually has a pretty short list of foods she's willing to eat. Peanut butter sandwiches, pizza, hot dogs (no bun), chicken muggets (nope, not a typo that's what she calls them), kraft dinner (sometimes) and canned pasta. That's pretty much the only meal type foods she will eat. As for snacks she's willing to eat almost anything cracker/cookie/granola bar related.

Abby's deal is partly a food texture issue. She used to like Kraft Dinner, but now can't eat it without gagging. The same with yogurt and puddings. She will eat the lemon merengue pudding, but only by licking it off a spoon tiny bits at a time. I have food texture issues myself so I certainly know what it's like. So in that vein she won't eat anything pasta based (she used to like the canned pasta as well,but I'm thinking she's over that now these days) or mushy like mashed potatoes.

Abby does have a longer list of approved foods compared to Maya. She'll happily eat grilled cheese, ham sandwiches, sardines (which are actually quesadillas, no idea why she calls them sardines), peanut butter, sausage, burgers, hot dogs, nuggets, pizza, bacon, scrambled eggs (sometimes), bologna, chicken breasts (sometimes), actual ham (not lunch meat ham) and cheese slices never real cheddar. She has a surprisingly sensitive palate too, so I'm not able to sneak much of anything past her. For snacks she and Maya are pretty well in tune.

She did recently try two new foods that thrilled Mike and I to no end. English muffins and a taco with meat and cheddar on it. Which blew her "I hate cheddar" campaign right out of the water. Mike and I were truly surprised since both girls are very reluctant to try new things. I usually end up packing a lunch for them when we eat at other people's houses. It's just easier.

As for dinners, I try to split up the week so the girls get some dinners they like and we get some we like. Of course on the night we get what we like I'm usually making a peanut butter sandwich for Maya and a grilled cheese for Abby on top of our meal. I never used to do this. Before Maya arrived there was always something on the table that Abby would eat. So I never can figure out how I ended up being the Mom who makes three dinners a night. I admit, I am a little tired of it, but not really sure where to go from here.....

So I wanna know.......

Do you have picky eaters? If so how do you deal with them?

i wanna know - how do you fight a cold?

Mike and I are both suffering from colds. Mike seems to have it worse than I do which should make for a fun weekend. I guess the worse part, really, for me is the exhaustion. I'm just so stinking tired. Every night this week I've been to bed hours before my regularly scheduled bedtime.

Now I may be late to the party on this one, but I only recently (I'm talking as recently as this week) discovered vick's Vapo-rub. I have been dipping myself in it nightly and it's been doing wonders for making me comfortable enough to get some much needed sleep. I have no idea why I haven't been using this my entire life, but I blame my mother. (love you mommy xoxox) But seriously I big red puffy heart Vick's Vapo-rub. And green tea. I've ingested many many mugs of green tea... and a few white as well.

So what I wanna know is......

Now that cold and flu season is upon us, what remedy to you swear by?

i wanna know - are you mr. clean??

I don't know about you, but house work is usually at the bottom of my to-do list. There just isn't enough hours in the day to do all the things I *want* to do, never mind the dusting. Now don't get me wrong, while it does occasionally look like we're raising goats in here it is normally somewhat neat and tidy. Well as neat and tidy as you can get in a house where two adults have three jobs between them, multiple do-gooder type commitments, endless hours of TV to watch important activities... oh and two kids with school, daycare and extracurricular activities. Did I mention them? The ones that can turn a clean room to total squalor quicker than you can blink.

So we tidy, endlessly it seems, but what about the deep cleaning? What about pulling out the cleaning products and really getting down to it? I have tried to work out some sort of a schedule that will work for me with zero success. There used to be a time before we had kids and Mike was working straight nights that I would spend Friday nights cleaning the house. Those days are long gone. Now Mike is a great tidier, but doesn't really go in for "cleaning". I let Abby mop and she thinks that is the best gift I could have ever given her. Of course I have to get to the sweeping and such before I turn her loose and I can't do that unless the rest of the room has been cleaned first. So in the end it doesn't get done as often as I think it probably should. And I probably wouldn't obsess so much if it weren't for the fact that I love the smell of the house after it's been cleaned. Especially since switching to green cleaning products. Such wonderful lemony citrusy smells.

Ideally I would love to find some sort of a system where I get these things like dusting and such done on a regular basis. I have worked a laundry routine that I like and works. I'm getting way better at actually folding and putting it away these days.

So......

what I wanna know is do you have a cleaning routine and does it work for you?

i wanna know - are you living green?

Abby is off for a week of eco-cottaging with Granny. They left last Friday and as you can see she was a tad excited. I talked to her tonight while she was visiting Uncle Dave and she said she misses me and she's cried for me, but she is having so much fun and she's glad she went.



So what exactly is an eco-cottage you may be asking. Well basically it's a wooden tent. Just a simple A frame cottage with no hydro. Real roughing it, with there being no TV and all. You see that word eco popping up everywhere. That or it's close cousin, green. Environmental issues are huge right now. There are countless spots running on TV on how it's our responsibility to reduce, reuse, recycle, use less water, less hydro, less gas.

I've always been a pretty responsible recycler. Making sure that everything that can go in the blue box does. And there was a time when I thought that was enough. It's not. I have been educating myself on living green and I am far from an expert. I'm not planning to build a straw bale or tire home. I'm not going to "live off the grid" although Mike and I would both really like to. But every little bit can only help, so here's how I'm doing what I can....

The green cart; After some trial and error I have found the best way to make the green cart experience user friendly is to keep a garbage bowl on the counter for food scraps. It makes it so I have no reason not to recycle my compostables. I usually dump it during my after dinner tidy up. Also vinegar is your best friend. Buy it in big jugs. Every Friday after the cart is dumped I pour a healthy slug of vinegar in the bottom and give the side walls a good spray. That works at keeping the bugs at bay.

Shopping; I really try to avoid single use purchases, like juice boxes and water bottles. The girls take litterless juice boxes in their lunches. Now I just have to work on my ziploc bag addiction. I use way too many.

Water; Our property has no well, so we have our water trucked in. Too make a load of water stretch as long as possible we collect rain water that gets diverted into our holding tank. We don't drink the water here, but rather refill our water cooler jugs at the Water Depot. We recently purchased a dehumidifier for the basement. It draws 18L of water in a 24 hour period. You know I couldn't let that go to waste, so use it to flush our toilet, which Mike said is mighty redneck of us, but that was before I saved us 400L . Now he thinks I'm a genius. He's right. We've also been collecting our pre-shower water. You know when you run the shower to get it hot. We waste approximately 5L of water every time one of us showers.

Hydro; We've changed all our bulbs to compact fluorescents, got rid of our dimmer switches, use ceiling fans to help circulate air, set our AC two degrees warmer than we normally have it, unplug unnecessary plugs like chargers, line dry our clothes, switched our Christmas lights to LEDs. For all of this we've noticed a significant drop in our Hydro bill. In fact when it comes time to balance our equal payment plan budget for the year, we're looking at a Hydro overpayment that should work out to a minimum of two months free hydro and that's after a mid year equal payment plan decrease.

Maybe not all that impressive compared to some, but it's something. And if money were no object you better believe Mike would have the roof of this house covered in solar panels and windmills and there'd be a brand new Chevy hybrid in the driveway.

So what I wanna know is this....

How are you living greener?