Monthly Archives: August 2011

Baby I’m-a Want You

Posted on by
“I figured out what I’m going to buy you,” my husband said as I walked in the door, holding a piece of paper in his hand.  A present for me?  Squee!  It’s my tenth anniversary in seven months and there is a three stone ring coming my way; my husband is a far-ahead planner so I thought maybe, maybe….
I was a little crestfallen to discover the paper was a Lowe’s flyer, and the item indicated was a high-efficiency toilet.  Oooh, baby.  I’m-a want you.  Nonetheless, all four of us went to Lowe’s and, after what was possibly the world’s longest discussion about different toilets and installation methods between my husband and the incredibly helpful plumbing department guy, we were the proud owners of a new toilet.  It rode around in the back of my van for a while, then took up residence in the garage for a couple of weeks, and yesterday, my husband installed it.
Suffice it to say that if you want to bring extreme joy and excitement to a household with children, introduce them to the concept of “choose your own flush”.  I am now the unhappy recipient of an extraordinary volume of details regarding my children and their toilet habits.  
But you didn’t come here to read about toilets!  Perhaps you would like to know what I did on my summer vacation?  Mainly I read novels on the beach, occasionally becoming enthusiastic about building sandcastles and then going back to reading.  I drank a lot of beer with my father-in-law and also quite a bit of wine.  I read novels while my children swam in the pool, I swam with them, and went back to reading.  I ate a lot.  That pretty much sums things up.    



My favourite moment of the trip was this one.  Reading novels by the pool is fine and everything, but so much more fun to jump in.  The boys were swimming to me!  Both of them!  I am amazed at how quickly they learn swimming skills while just having fun with Mom and Dad.  Sigh.  Is it too much to ask for a pool in my backyard?  And hot weather to go with it?  Sigh. 



Oh, HAI.

Posted on by

Where, you may be wondering, have I been?  Or perhaps you were not wondering that at all.  In any case, I’m just back from a sunny vacation during which the following momentous events occurred: Jake went from a reluctant, life-jacket wearing child to one who jumped into the pool and swam across it without the assistance of floatation devices, I ate four tomatoes a day fresh from my mother-in-law’s garden, the boys and I spent many hours honing our engineering skills with respect to sand sculptures, and I got, awkwardly enough, approached by my sister-in-law’s swinging single male neighbour.  Sugar daddy!  Oh wait.  I think I already have one of those.

So it was a great vacation, and I even have a suntan.  I am also completely sapped from the drive home.  It is surprisingly energy consuming to sit in the passenger seat and hand out snacks for eight hours.  It is also energy consuming to listen with sympathy and interest to the various conversations coming at me from three different directions.  From Mark came incessant questions about the exact number of minutes until we would arrive at our destination, along with a near-constant commentary on the nature and names of the various bodies of water we were passing.  Jake alternated between playing and snacking quietly in his seat, and becoming filled with Hulk-like rage over sitting in his seat for hours.  My husband, in the tradition of the last thirteen years of our road trips together, and perhaps for even longer than that, released an irate barrage of curses on three types of drivers: the elderly, those driving motorhomes and/or trailers, and people from the prairies who drive twenty kilometers an hour below the speed limit on curvy roads, but insanely fast on straightaways and passing lanes so that passing was impossible.  God help us all if a driver happened to belong to all three catogories.  It is happy that he doesn’t have voodoo dolls; if he did, drivers all along the TransCanada would suddenly have their eyes popping out of their heads or suffer instant heart failure. 

So what did I miss while I was away?  Tell me everything. xo