Life, or something like it..

Visitors from afar

Our latest guests were my cousin's from Germany. I love when the come to visit - my family generally has such a poor sense of family, it is nice to once an a while get to do the "family" thing with people other than my in-laws. Our favorite games when they come to visit are "You don't know how good you have it hear - you know how much this would cost at home?", and "Crazy Politicians for $100 Jack". I never have quite so much as an appreciation for living in Canada (and I know how lucky we have it), as when they come to visit. Anywhere that considers $4 a litre for gas as reasonable, that pays $900K for a townhouse, and where Wrangler jeans (you know, the ones that we buy in Wal-Mart) cost almost $100 reminds me of how spoiled we are here. Thank goodness we live in such a great place!

Baby Friends

So apparently the people over at MSN Families are starting to write about what I've said before - that babies and toddlers are capable of making friends, despite all the "experts" out there that say they aren't capable of it. 

We've had even more evidence of Alex having his group of buddies that he thinks of in terms of friends - within his group of Kempville kids, he'll play with them and share toys - well, as much as any 16 month old with share.. but with anyone outside his group of friends, he "nests" his toys and then sits on them to protect them.. I always had thought that by socializing him well (he has played with this group of kids 2-3 times a week for more than a year) that that would socialize him to all kids, but apparently it doesn't work that way.  Ah well, he is big enough to wrestle his toys from his cousins on his own now!

One of the things that I have to disagree with the article about though is their contention that it still isn't a "real" interaction - that there is now the believe that while there can be a bond between toddlers that they still do not believe that they play interactively.  However, within this group of toddlers, I have seen two little boys (16 and 14 months) literally gang up, pin down, and collectively take a toy from a third toddler (15 months).  If that is not working together I don't know what is! And this same trio has been  seen numerous times working out a problem together - like how to get at a toy that is up to high for them to grab (in that case the strong one dragged a baby chair over, the second held the chair, while the third scrambled up to get the toy - I kid you not.  The OEYC co-ordinator keeps shaking her head at the three of them).  And Alex will play Marco / Polo with *anyone* willing to play - now how is that not interactive I ask again?

I think the basic question is not if toddlers are capable of playing, but why it is that so many people treat children (babies and toddlers included) like they are somehow less human? Just because they are younger they aren't  somehow less of a whole person - just because they do things in a different way does not mean they are not capable of the same emotional responses the rest of us are and deserve the same respect that any adult would receive.  Care for them yes.  Provide guidance and boundaries, yes.  But at the same time, let them know why they are necessary, and don't trivialize the fact that they are going to think that the boundaries suck, any more than an adult in the same situation would.

There's one in every family

Oh my god.. I cannot ... I take that back.. I do not want to believe that my son is in the same gene pool as those people.. I swear to god my in-laws must thrive on chaos, inconsiderateness, and gossip... I'll get to the other to in another post, but I'll start with the former today... So my sister-in-law - the one that needed my father in law to drive to Boston to pick her up - decided pretty much at the last minute that she was going to come up here so that she could attend a wedding of a cousin of ours. Before sorting out where she was going to move, her paperwork with the new job, etc. I have to admire her blind fate that everything will work out, but holy cows the hoops that she has to jump through doing everything always on the spur of the moment. She actually managed to get a place sorted out (over the phone no less, and the place actually didn't turn out to be that bad - as far as we know right now). She even got her contract with the new place worked out - not too shabby considering that she is here in Canada right now, and the job is down in Connecticut. But apparently blind faith and the US Immigration don't have a bilateral agreement, and so the few bits of photocopied papers that she had trying to prove (a) that she was allowed to be working down in the states and (b) Immigration should have never seized her paper work when she came up to visit, didn't quite up to the results she was hoping for. It is dizzying trying to keep up with all of her adventures. No wonder my PIL think she still needs to be taken care of (not really, but what an exhausting lifestyle!).

Wastes of air

I just love /drip/ stupid clients. Because, you know, i just want to spend my morning cleaning up their messes. Oh well, more billable for me.

The onset of cooler weather

Sigh. So it begins.. as we took our walk yesterday, we saw the first leaves turning red. The upside of the cooler weather is that we *finally* finished having a long string of most welcome, but totally time consuming visitors, from friends coming out to hang and use the pool, to family visiting from other regions and beyond. My beloved little computer corner which I carved out for myself in our totally packed house is unfortunately in our guest room (if you have read about this pet peeve of mine before, by all means skip to the next paragraph), which means my few precious moments of spare time each evening are either relegated to clean-up duty, or are negated to my computer being banished into an otherwise occupied room. Would it be totally unreasonable to say, "hey, I know you are trying to sleep, so don't mind me as I sit in the dark and surf..". Sigh But a glimmer of hope has appeared.. now with the cooler weather and sun worshiping pool season is over, DH and I are relegated back to the back shelf in people's lives once again.. at least until the fall when bonfire season begins! So I guess I better blog like the dickens the next few weeks to pile up enough posts for those days that I can only log in for mere seconds so that I never leave what ever loyal readers I still have left in a lurch without a daily read again!

Doing the girl thing

So if you knew me, you would know how ridiculous the concept of me "doing the girl thing" is, since I practically live in flannel. But we have a wedding to go to on Saturday, where I am helping (it's my cousin's, even though he's really my husband cousin if you know what I mean), and so did one of the other Kemptville mom's, and since our non-playgroup dinner party went so swimmingly on Saturday we decided to pile into a third mom's mini-van, and made the trip, with three 15 month olds, to Bayshore to look for dresses, accessories, etc. I have never been so exhausted from shopping in my entire life. Then again, I also haven't taken 6 hours to cover just floors 2 and 3. Of course, the latter is where the food court was, which is the real downfall, since I needed lots and lots of sugar therapy to sooth my aching soul that I have not yet lost all the weight that I swore I would loose by the wedding. Sigh. Maybe I will loose it by the next one. Of course, I could be pg by that point, and then it would be fairly redundant to attempt weight loss at that point! (smile)

Day 2

Day 2 back at work. So far so good. I shouldn't complain, given that I only had to go in for 2 in the afternoon. I like the idea that I set my own schedule, but my biggest worry is that I won't have the self discipline to do my hours every week. I have to do 37.5 in a week, which isn't bad, but with everything else that is going on, I feel like I need to build some type of chart so that I can squeeze it all in! The smart thing would be to drop some of the stuff, but I am finally at the stage where I am starting to have some friends again (you know, the people that actually care if you are alive or dead, and actually call once in a while to see what's going on in your world), and as sad as it is, it has been a really, really long time since I've had any real friends, so the last thing I want to do is either give up our weekly outings, or the stuff that kinda comes up. Yes, the argument is there that if they really are friends, they understand about scheduling, and being busy, particularly since they all have kids the same age as the little darling, but it is still in the "new" stage, where you are just becoming friends, and you could just as easily been forgotten or whatever, and so I am still a little neurotic about it (can you tell? :) ). But my last friends weren't real friends, and my last group of real friends were years and years ago, and its gotten rather lonely only being the DH and me, with no one to vent to about the day to day stuff (DH tries, but he doesn't always get it). So this group that I met through the town's baby playgroup has played in no small part in helping me get through the insanity of the last year - through all the neurotic, nerve wracking, sleepless nights, the paranoia that you are *always* doing the *completely* WRONG thing for the little darling, and all the desperate lows and joyous highs. But the leap from baby group friends to friends is still a long one, although we seem to be heading more and more in that area. It helps that all of our DHs seem to get along quite well. So we tried to have a dinner party last Saturday, which we managed to pull together literally a few hours before. It was one of those typical pot luck kind of get togethers, the ones that old friends do where the point is to be together, and not what you are having, where everyone just grabs whatever they have in the fridge, and piles over to someones house for the evening. And even though we had the hindrance of the newness of our friendship, I haven't had such a good time in so long. We roared laughing throughout dinner, and ended up talking at the end of the driveway when we should have all been heading home for hours. And even though I only got about 3 hrs sleep that night, I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Our first real word

I am about to insert a gushy, silly, parent type beam below, so you will have to excuse this pause in my normally scheduled blog:

Oh what an exciting moment!  We had our first *real* word today!  I am such a geek - it was so cool!

I do not consider yes, no, mummy, daddy, or ama (grandma) real words.  Every kid says them, and they all usually do so in the same kind of order.  And so, it was no big thing when he started saying da-da to the DH almost a year ago.

But today was definitely a big moment.  We were giving him his bath, and he pointed to his bath toy which had floated away, and said "duh-key".  I was stunned.  I called in the DH to make sure that I heard right (I think I might have posted once or twice about the recent lack of sleep), and after we asked him what his toy was, once again he said "ducky", and much more clearly too..

(grin) My boy is such a genius..

Playing Tag

I have to say I am so lucky to have the DH that I have... now, don't get me wrong, he has his normal husband-like short comings, but he is a great dad.  We have a game that we call "tag", which I thought was pretty normal for parents, but as I talk to the other mom's I am finding out it is rare...

Tag goes something like this: 

"Honey, I feel like crap today"

"So do I dear"

"Okay, you take shift one, and then we'll swap".  And being the great guy that he is, I always get the second shift.  Which means he'll take the little darlin, sometimes out, sometimes in, but always out of earshot so that I can catch up on sleep/read/work/do chores/some or all of the above, and then when I am done, we swap so that he can do the same.

Now I thought this game was pretty universal, but apparently it only comes in the "play at home" version, and is pretty local to just my area.  Silly me for thinking that it was suitable for family play, but apparently the primary players are mom's and grandmom's, not spouses.  Boy do some of those dad's get it easy.  In my world, parenting is a two person activity, in every sense of the world, and thank god my DH feels the same way...

So when it rains it pours

So once again the fates are playing games with my mind. Not that that is hard to do.. so I go 5 weeks without a nibble for jobs, and when one of my original two finally comes through (the choices that I talked about in my previous post), I get 4 additional offers! ARGH!