A Little Bit of Catchy-Uppy

Cripes it's been ages. We had an awesome winter, which is odd for me to say since I haven't been a fan for a long, long time. The weather was pretty favourable, and the clincher was accompanying the boys on their school ski trip. I actually put skis on for the first time in over twenty years.

The boys had a great season of Judo. Cooper received a promotion from yellow belt to yellow with an orange stripe. Carter didn't receive the same promotion so it was a major life lesson that evening.

I'm going to sum up the past six or eight months with a few pictures. Facebook is nearly my sole connection to the outside world these days; I don't ever do digital scrapbooking anymore, however I keep relatively busy with my hobby of doing birthday invitations, business cards and other print projects.

Carter turned NINE last week. I'm just in the process of planning his party. I printed up some lovely Minecraft-themed invitations, however in the meantime he has decided on a Pokemon party. ::sigh::

Here are a few event updates...
October 2011:
Thanksgiving - dinner at Mom and Dad's with the whole fam-damily.
Concert with Cindy, Carmelle, and Yvette to see Alyssa Reid and Neverest.
A family trip out to our friends' cabin for the weekend.
Dacryocystorhinostomy - I had eye surgery to create a new tear duct to divert from my blocked duct. It was successful, however after a few months has started to leak again. :(

November 2011:
The arrival of a friend's new baby. (Welcome Joseph!)
Girls' Night Out (hereafter referred to as GNO) - consists of snacks and drinks at one of the girls' places. We try to do this as often as we can all convene to celebrate birthdays or just everyday life.
Date night to a Jully Black concert - FANTASTIC!

December 2011:
The arrival of Marsha and Ryan's twin girls - August and Reverie. Welcome girls! ♥
A fairly quiet Christmas with family.

January 2012
A new Judo dojo - a very short walk from home instead of a fifteen-minute drive! :)
Going sliding at the park...Daddy tried to show off for the boys on their GT sno racers and landed on his head. Mr. Stubborn wouldn't go to the doctor but he quite likely broke his shoulder. A week at home to recover shortened our summer vacation. :(

February 2012
Another concert - Serena Ryder - fantastically talented young lady!
Family Day - first time off on Family Day for me. We participated in some community activities - there was a huge man-made sliding hill and we all had fun there!
Mom on TV's "You Gotta Eat Here" - episode from Buster's Barbecue.

March 2012
A long-awaited movie - "The Hunger Games". Well done. :)

April 2012
Auntie Lurdes' retirement party.
Doggy sitting.
Trip to Thunder Bay with Kelly and a sweet present for doggy sitting - a Kindle!

May 2012
Business Excellence Awards - Nominated for Employee of the Year - Service Sector. A great evening out. I didn't win the category but had a fantastic dinner and evening out with friends.
Hope and the City - Wow! GNO of all GNOs! A night to raise money for Cancer plus a night to get all gussied up and go out with 500 other women! Good times were had by all!

Right Place, Right Time

Well, Fall is here but today was a beautiful, warm day. Yesterday too...Chris has barbecued two days in a row. I've still been fighting a cold the past few days. Mom brought some delicious chicken soup yesterday and I enjoyed it for supper today.

On my way home from work yesterday, I stopped in to see Chris at work. He went to pick up the kids while I went to get a few groceries. I went to M&M and got some bacon-wrapped filet mignon, and to the grocery store for some veggies. On my way home, I just happened to catch the tail end of an announcement on the radio about a radio contest...had to be caller number four. As I drove (my bad!) I dialed the radio station, still listening to find out the contest details. Sure enough, I was caller number four, which qualified me to be in a draw for a fifty dollar gift certificate at a local clothing store. The announcer kept me on the phone to get contact info, and advised me the draw was going to be in just a few minutes.

I got home and put away the groceries. Just as I sat down, my phone rang and it was the radio station. I won the draw and can pick up my gift certificate next week. Talk about right place/right time! :)

Today I had some fun creating some birthday invitations for a coworker. In order to post it, I changed the info. Here is a demo of the invitation; I got the idea here and created my own. The lid is attached to an insert that lifts out of a slot in the card part to show the invitation. Fun!



A couple evenings ago I sold the boys' bunk beds. They're the kind with shelves and drawers built in, and they take up a lot of space in an already small room. I've arranged to buy a couple captain's/mate's beds for them. Maybe with the drawers built in those, I might actually put some of the boys' clothes in them. Doubt it, but maybe it will help with the lack of space in the room at least.

It's been a fairly quiet weekend so far. Chris is out watching UFC at a friend's house. I had some fun building a fort for the boys and it was really quiet for a little while when they were watching a movie in there. Now they're both asleep and I'm about ready to turn in too.

Time Shift

I really don't know where time goes. Just when I thought I might become a regular blogger again, another week passes.

Last week I didn't mention the boys started Judo again. Twice a week. Chris and I take turns taking them. It starts earlier now, and is a shorter session to accommodate the younger kids like ours and the more advanced judoists later. I haven't taken any pictures yet; maybe if the kids each get a new gi then the pictures will look different from last season!

I didn't end up posting new pictures, but managed to change my blog header from a winter scene to a summer one; just in time for the season to change to fall and winter again. ::sigh::

Today was my turn for Judo, but I only took Carter. Awhile after I returned to work from my lunch break, I got a call from the school that Cooper had hit another kid. I thought the lady meant he punched someone, but she rephrased and told me he bonked heads with another kid and had a goose egg on his head. She said at first he was fine and all talkative but then he got quiet and wasn't feeling well. I went to pick him up right away and brought him back to work with me to keep an eye on him. I'd planned to finish what I was working on and take him home, but he was surprisingly easy to entertain with my iPad (briefly). A coworker gave him a little project to do; cutting out some therapy materials for the speech pathologists. He even paper clipped them together and handed them in separately. Cute.

I took him for coffee break too and he got to have a cuddle with Kelly for a few minutes. Obviously he seemed fine by this time but whenever I had mentioned bringing him back to school, he professed that he wasn't feeling THAT well! I managed to stay at work for the rest of the afternoon. I brought Cooper home and Chris picked Carter up. We had a quick supper before I took off in the pouring rain to bring Carter to judo.

I've been working on a few projects lately; some wedding items for a coworker I did as a gift:

Since last winter, we've been without cable TV. I switched us over to Netflix back in Februaryish. I don't miss cable TV at all, though our Netflix is LOUSY compared to the U.S. And it's not a U.S. thing, it's a Canada thing. Apparently our CRTC or whatever governing body licenses television and movie viewing around here doesn't allow all the programming. So much of it is old or "B" movies but still, it's commercial-free and only eight bucks a month, and the kids don't seem to watch as much TV. I kept us on cable internet though, thank goodness, and we can watch pretty much any TV shows we're missing out on on the computer, though that's rare. The kids seem to be loving watching old Pink Panther cartoon episodes, which I find amusing.

Well, that's about it for me; hope to be back soon! :)

What the What?

Despite my absence over the past LONG while, I've really missed blogging. Facebook seems to have completely taken over any documenting of our happenings and pictures; which is easy, fast, and most convenient, but still kind of a bummer.

So let's see...the kids are in school again, which started on August 30th. I have this thing where I think school should start in September, but the boys have settled in okay. Carter is now in grade three, and Cooper is in grade one. I'll sort through some pictures if I'm really serious about getting into the blogging circuit again.

Three days ago, September 11th, we were at the beach with some friends. The weather was hot, the water was refreshing. Then Mother Nature dropped the temperature like it was a hot potato. It snowed today. Ewwwww. So much for easing us into cooler weather.

Chris and I still work in the same places. It was a busy, hot summer, with many trips to the beach and to visit friends and family at camp. The pinnacle of the summer was my 40th birthday on Canada Day, July 1st. My family, friends, and a few coworkers threw a surprise birthday party for me. It was fantastic. Aside from the grand surprise, I received an amazing Cheryl Parenteau cake, and a long-coveted iPad I'd been hemming and hawing over buying.

Over the past year or so, I've had some eye troubles. It started with a goopy eye infection. One day when I was rubbing my eye, I felt a sharp pain. Ever since, I've had a leaky eye, since the tear duct to carry tears away from the eye seems to be blocked. It took an optometrist, two nurse practitioners, and finally the winner, the opthalmologist to figure it out. I'm supposed to be booked for surgery this October. Hopefully that will happen; it will be nice to not have a leaking eye all the time. Sometimes it's just a drop, other times a stream of tears runs down my face. I look forward to getting it fixed.

Well, that was a cheap catch-up post, so I'll go review some pictures and maybe add in a little slideshow to this post.

A Fun-Filled Weekend

I already can't recall Friday; seems too long ago. But I had a great Saturday; a really lazy one with the boys. Late in the afternoon I finally got my rear in gear and covered up the 'grey highlights' in my hair. I bathed and showered and got ready to meet up with the girls for girls' night at Kelly's house.

I picked up Yvette and we dropped off our stuff at Kelly's then she came with me to drop off my Jeep. We walked to Kelly's and that's when the fun began. It was a packed house, with Kelly, me, Yvette, Carmelle, Serena, Dianne, Allison, Melissa, and newcomer Brittni. Instead of playing SingStar like we usually do, we've taken a liking to dance games on the Wii. The past couple girls' nights we've played 'The Michael Jackson Experience' which we love, but this time, Melissa brought 'Just Dance 2'. FUN!

We had a tonne of food, (which for my non-metric friends is about 204 pounds more than a ton!) and had plenty of lovely blue drinks. My favourite of late is called a 'Blue Lagoon'. Here is the recipe:

In a cocktail shaker half-filled with ice...
1 ounce vodka (I used black cherry vodka)
1 ounce blue curaçao
Fill with lemonade.
Shake and pour!

I add cocktail cherries and a pretty-coloured umbrella just to pretend I'm somewhere tropical. Looks like Windex, tastes like Heaven.

It was a fun (and late) night. I walked home sometime around two. Sunday morning I was a little sleepy but felt pretty good. I had a Bingo date with Kelly and Yvette planned for the afternoon. Kelly's birthday is coming up but she'll be away for it, so I brought her little goody bag of birthday stuff to Bingo. We had a blast of course, though the winning left a little to be desired. I was still happy to yell Bingo even though it was twenty-seven dollars in the early bird game.

I got home and was greeted to something delicious-smelling when I walked in. Chris had concocted a pasta dish and made garlic bread. Yummy! I was pretty tired by this time, but we had plans to go to Cindy and Bob's for a surprise birthday party put on by his son Zach. Zach spent about ten hours on Bob's birthday cake, which was a very large pair of boob cakes, complete with nipple piercings. Very funny, and he's gotten very talented with fondant. We had a great visit and we were stuffed from the delicious cake.

Today was a pretty quiet day at the office. Days like today are great for getting paperwork done. It's going to be a busy week this week. Judo, church meetings, medical appointments...

Tomorrow Carter's class is going on their ski trip that was postponed from a few weeks ago. I hope the weather cooperates so he can have a great day. I doubt I'll get my hands on any pictures since I won't be there, but I'll see if I can get some from one of the other parents.

How Did I Do It?

Am I busier now? The kids are bigger and aside from their already-teenage attitudes, they're easier to care for. Our only extracurricular activity is Judo and it's only twice a week. Why can't I blog every day?

On Tuesday I took both boys to school, but received a call from Carter's teacher just after ten-thirty, saying he wasn't feeling well. I told them I'd be there in twenty minutes. I waited until everyone took coffee breaks, then as I was about to leave, I realized I didn't have a vehicle because I had taken the Jeep in for an oil change. I had already arranged for Carter to hang out with my Dad for the afternoon, so I had to add in the detail of Chris picking up Carter and bringing him to my office for Dad to pick him up. That worked out well. I guess things were starting to work themselves out gastrointestinally for Carter, but not well enough yet. He had a quiet afternoon with his Grandpa.

I took Cooper to Judo while Carter stayed home with his Dad. It's getting really enjoyable watching the kids at Judo because they're really learning the skills. From the counting and names of the moves in Japanese to knowing on command how to do them, it's really neat.

That night Carter was still complaining his tummy hurt, so Chris arranged to stay home with him for the day on Wednesday. I was starting to have some nagging doubt that Carter was really feeling that badly, but I didn't want to doubt him in case something was really wrong. Things started to percolate for him much better by Wednesday, and he returned to his perky little self. I think he was peppering conversations with comments of still having a tummyache but I specifically told him Wednesday was his last day at home.

On Thursdays for the next couple months Carter has meetings/classes at the church for his upcoming First Communion. Unfortunately it coincides with our Judo schedule, but it's a necessary sequence of meetings and he won't miss the Judo wind-up.

In general the workweek flew by. Friday was a good day, including lunching out with an old friend from high school, a coworker and her friend, and a surprise visit from my parents at Masala. The buffet was delicious as usual and I was full enough to not want to eat supper. After work Chris puttered around outside working on his 4-wheeler. Carter and Cooper had both shoveled the driveway in the morning before school (!) so it saved Chris a bunch of work!

Once Chris came in I went to pick up KFC. Carter was desperately professing his starvingness by this time and had put in the request. After they ate we watched movies for awhile before the boys fell asleep. Chris went to work this morning as usual and I took the boys for a donut and got myself another (free) coffee. Also on my agenda for the day is to get rid of these grey highlights...Chris might take the boys to the sno-cross races today. Nice day for it! :)

He's So Full of It

Today was an eventful one. Carter had a tummy ache since Saturday and I was getting pretty worried. I was hoping it was just constipation but didn't want to take any chances of his appendix rupturing or something. So this morning he still wasn't himself and hadn't produced his usual output so we dropped Cooper off at school and I brought Carter to work with me. My plan was to call the clinic when it opened and if I could get a walk-in appointment, I'd take him to Mom and Dad's if they were around until the appointment. If I couldn't get one, I'd just take him to the ER. So after waiting for the place to open, then trying for about 10-15 minutes of non-stop redialing, I decided to take him up.

We got in quickly to the triage nurse, then were taken to a room where Carter got to lie down with a toasty warm, just-out-of-the-oven blanket. We waited awhile then the doctor came in and knew Carter wasn't feeling well. He checked his belly and ordered an x-ray. Carter lit up like a Christmas tree, he was so excited. Shortly after, he had to take off his pants to put on a gown and was transported by wheelchair to the x-ray room. He was thrilled to be maneuvered on the x-ray table, then I had to leave the room so she could take the pictures.

He was offered a sticker, and opted for the "I had an x-ray today" one. He was driven back to the room where we awaited the verdict from the doctor. The doctor came in and said, "Well, you're full of poop." He prescribed a gentle laxative and a fleet enema. We went to the pharmacy but opted for just the laxative. I brought him to hang out with his grandparents for the afternoon (we're so lucky to have them so handy :) I gave him a dose and we were treated to salmon salad sandwiches for lunch. Carter nibbled a little on one; he'd been eating like a bird all weekend.

On my way back to work I stopped at Tim Horton's for a coffee. This morning one of my coworkers was behind me the first time I went through, so I paid for her coffee. This time I was rewarded with what I like to call coffee karma, and the person ahead of me bought my coffee. Sweet!

The month of February has flown by as if it were just a week. I made these Valentine cards for the boys to take to school. I also was oddly ambitious enough to design and print out personalized lollipop covers to match the cards for each classmate and teacher. Unfortunately the morning before Valentine's Day I woke up with a wry neck and didn't feel up to cutting them all out. Instead I whipped up personalized envelopes.

For Carter's I added extra work to the project by doing green for the boys and pink for the girls. Leave it to me to complicate things as much as possible!




For friends and family, I did these ones, and kept one of each to stick on our fridge. ♥




Last week I went to Winnipeg with Kelly and Ben for Ben's orthodontic appointment. He went to get his braces off. It's been a long time since we made one of these trips. We went to the mall, where the dentist office is. We arrived early despite the insane city traffic, and had breakfast at the food court, where barely anything was even open yet. I guess the mall opens at ten. The nerve of them for not opening sooner since we were in town. haha. Kelly and I wandered the mall while Ben was at his appointment. I was more looking forward to a Costco spree. Ben found us and we made our way to Costco. I bought a bunch of my favourite things...apparently I have quite a penchant for large Zip-Loc freezer bags, and lo and behold they were even on sale, so I bought a three-pack of forty bags. That ought to last me awhile!

After we had eaten a big breakfast, we regretted it almost instantly thinking we wouldn't have any room for a feast at Red Lobster. Fortunately all the walking and shopping took up enough time and energy that we managed to squeeze it in before leaving the city. It was the start of Lobsterfest (YUM!) so I had some sort of feast with two lobster tails and some shrimp alfredo pasta. I was torn over two different meal orders since one included the garlic shrimp. The lovely waitress advised I could add it to the lobster meal, so of course I did. We gorged on the salty, cheesy biscuits, Caesar salad, and of course the lobster feast. Kelly treated me to this amazing lunch for being her navigator. Each time we came out of a store, and from the restaurant, we were pleasantly surprised to find her vehicle was still there every time. Kelly wasn't worried about her vehicle being stolen this time; she simply knows what to do now when it happens. Having OnStar is a plus too; apparently if she'd had it when it was stolen before, they could have located it in about three minutes. Fortunately we didn't have to deal with any of that. Yay!

So after a productive day we headed back home, only being gone about fifteen hours in total, with over half of it driving time. In other happy news, the weather must be getting a little milder because the back window wiper on my Jeep started working like a charm again today. I guess it just does not like cold weather! It's nice to see out the back window again! :)

Well, now, poor Carter gets constipated and I get the verbal diarrhea. Feels good to blog it all out again! I hope to keep up with it; this is way better than a one-line status update on Facebook or a 128-character Tweet!

Winter Fun

Today we went to a birthday party for a daughter of Chris's friend and coworker. Yours truly actually donned all my winter gear INCLUDING skates! The boys enjoyed skating and quickly went from shuffling along to gliding. They had a few slips and falls but I'm happy to report I managed to stay vertical. Here are a few pictures of the party:





















We came home and watched a bit of TV then the boys (all three) crashed. That was a fun day. :)

Happy New Everything

Lordy Lordy it's been a long time. I got so remiss in my blogging duties that I got scared to attempt it, with so much to catch up on. Let's see...it was SUMMER the last time I blogged. Right now we're smack in the middle of winter, but thanks to Groundhogs Wyarton Willie and his Punxatawney counterpart, we're supposed to get an early spring.

Many things are the same and many have changed. Of course the boys have changed the most. Carter is in grade two and Cooper is in senior kindergarten. Cooper started full-time in the fall. We enrolled the boys in Judo in the fall, and we still enjoy taking them twice a week. Chris and I take turns bringing them and enjoy a couple hours of solitude when it's our turn to stay home.

Life continues to be busy with work and wanting to find more time to spend with family and friends. We enjoyed a great Christmas with all the family that was nearby. I got spoiled and have been enjoying my new winter boots and mitts, making this an enjoyable winter since my feet are warm and dry.

The thing I miss most about blogging is keeping track of our lives. It's so hard to remember any details from summer to now since there are so many. I haven't even compiled all our pictures from 2010 yet; maybe that will help me piece things together. Well, I hope to be back to this soon; maybe a new blog header will help inspire me to stay tuned.

Weird Comments

I'm getting weird comments almost daily, I suspect from spammers but I cannot tell because it's in an Asian language. Maybe if I could at least read them I wouldn't keep deleting them!

Yeah, that's about all I've got. I have so many fun stories from our two week vacation we just returned to work from but I'm not caught up on my sleep or laundry or pretty much anything!