Monthly Archives: December 2014

Boyhouse Year In Review 2014

Posted on by

I have a confession to make: earlier this month, I thought of closing this blog down. I thought maybe I should retire it; when I started it in 2008 – 2008! – I was writing about life with two little boys, aged 3 and 4. I was writing about funny and not so funny anecdotes about life with little boys; the boys aren’t little anymore and I don’t really write about them anymore. And here’s the thing – the blogging world isn’t what it used to be. Well, what is? Some might say that personal blogs aren’t a thing anymore.

I thought I’d write a year in review, then maybe close this baby down. But then as I started going through old posts, I realized something. I like personal blogging. I like having this online diary where I record minor and unimportant happenings, because who remembers the minor and unimportant things?

So it looks like the Boyhouse will live to see another day. And what happened in the Boyhouse in 2014? Lots! Lots of minor and unimportant things.

January

I shopped a lot at Costco and had lots of thoughts about it. I talked all about Vera’s Weiner Pie and other upsetting recipes from the Lutheran Ladies’ Family Favourites, and boasted about my puffy pirate shirt from the early 90s. I also posted photos of me without makeup, and with makeup, just to show the startling difference beauty products make (also, I probably need more sleep).

Pirate

The puffy shirt.

February

I decided to become, for one day only, a motivational speaker (although I did not take up residence in a van down by the river). I reminisced about what shopping “across the line” was like, back in my childhood, when it was a real thing to go to the US for cheap items and exotic things like Hostess Twinkies. I weirdly developed a crush on the Canadian Men’s Curling Team AND the boys played the recorder terribly.

311

I also showed off my new eyelashes courtesy of Daniel Thompson Beauty.

March

Yelling is now considered to be just as detrimental as spanking, according to a study that came out that month, and so I may as well have taken out my blacksnake whip to the jerky kids at the playground. I posted a photo of myself in a bikini, and Mark turned 10!

10

A PERFECT ten, some might say!

April

We returned home from a trip to Maui, I yelled at some university students for leaving beer cans on my yard, and I turned 39!

tiara

And my friend gave me a tiara of my very own!

May

I found out that my favourite clothing store, Jacob, was closing and I had a massive crisis over the inability to find suitable clothing for a “woman of my age”. I described a very strange quirk of mine and also learned that “throughout the ages, music class has been lame”. I discovered that I look like a mix between Agnes Skinner and Nick Nolte, and also did NOT volunteer for field trips.

033

Plus, my husband bought me the greatest Mother’s Day gift ever – a giant bag of dirt.

June

The children finally, officially outgrew their Vancouver 2010 Olympic Mascots t-shirts, and my mom made them into pillows, I wrote down the wrong date for the end of school, and I saw a human arm in our alley (attached to a human).

026

The best way to repurpose t-shirts.

July

I realized everyone has a great story, even my neighbours, the kids went to karate camp and I cried to get my own way at the tire place, and I discovered that Alex Trebek is 74 years old.

gianthat

I also spent a lot of time at the lake and at the pool, wearing a giant hat.

 August

We visited my in-laws and I had a massive wardrobe malfunction, trying to be the fun mom. I got all controversial and opinionated, and I admitted to three very strange things.

Nosehill

I also spent a lot of time hanging with the boys in the sunshine.

September

It snowed and threw the whole city into chaos, but I got by with a little help from my friends, Jake turned nine, and I got maudlin about Franklin books.

085

Nine! It feels fine.

 October

I went to Toronto for the Blissdom Canada conference and had a blissful blast, I bought running shoes, and I carved pumpkins in the kids’ classes and still have all my fingers.

meandboys

I also visited the in-laws for Thanksgiving.

 

November

I set a new record for finishing Christmas shopping, my mother forced me to take my things from where they were stored at her house, which my husband dubbed my “childhood boxes of terror”, and I went through the Sears Wish Book.

deadguy

November was also the month of the mannequin.

creepymannequin

The mannequin, raised Lazarus-like from the dead.

December

I prepped for Christmas by insanely going to both Costco and the post office, the mannequin returned, much worse for the wear, and I talked about enjoying the holidays without losing one’s mind.

062

We also enjoyed creating fugly gingerbread.

So goodbye, 2014! Thank you for reading, and – as I hokily say to the boys every New Year’s Eve – see you next year! xo

Cherry Cherry

Posted on by

Sometimes, in order to get motivated, one needs to have a period of complete sloth, and that was me last week. I didn’t exercise. I didn’t work. I did the bare minimum around the house. Basically I spent a lot of time on the couch, with a glass of wine and this:

pioneergirl

Between my kids, husband, and mother-in-law, I received fifteen books for Christmas. My husband had wrapped them all but when we got an Amazon delivery on December 23, he decided he had enough of wrapping paper and tape and just handed me the book. It has essentially taken up every spare second I have had since then. I will have much to say about this – the Ingalls family saw much more scandal and poverty than one might think from reading the children’s books – but it will have to be at another time.

On Christmas morning, my husband handed me a small package, saying in a discouraged tone that he wasn’t sure I would like it, and that he did keep the receipt. It’s very unusual for him to be so unsure about a gift, since he normally bats things right out of the park. For example, this was in my stocking:

wine

Santa sure knows how to stuff MY stocking.

Anyway, my husband was uncharacteristically filled with insecurity, but when I opened the gift I couldn’t understand why. This choice shows how well he knows me!

neil

I’m not going to say it’s the greatest Christmas album ever, but it’s definitely close.

So I was mostly slothful and busy eating lots of snack mix and drinking lots of wine, but I had to haul myself off the couch on Christmas day, because I was hosting Christmas dinner. It was my very first that I hosted, and I think it went really well.

179

After all this relaxation and festivity, I woke up on Boxing Day with a bee in my bonnet. I was filled with my usual urge to rip down the tree and

hyperbole

But for reasons unknown, I had agreed to go Boxing Day shopping with my husband. Every year he takes advantage of the sales to purchase new suits, ties, and other expensive work wear. I had, for some reason – marital harmony, perhaps – said I would go with him while the kids stayed at home and played with their new video games. And I will tell you this: it was a huge mistake. For one thing, since Jacob closed its doors, every other clothing store means nothing to me. NOTHING. While my husband was busily fitting new suits, I was wandering from store to store amongst hordes of people who were foaming at the mouth. I wandered into Guess only to be completely shocked by the clothing. I wandered into H&M and wandered back out when I was confronted by the same black acid wash jeans I had in junior high. I was a person without a destination, which is not the way to Boxing Day shop, as evidenced by the stampede of people at Aritzia. In the end, I was bitterly regretting the one hour I spent at the mall, and by the time my husband was done I was pretty much ready to run home, just so I could clean the house.

The second we got in the door, I took off my “nice shopping clothes” and put on yoga pants, fuzzy socks, and an old waffle-weave shirt and began boxing things up. All Christmas-card glitter and dust was wiped away, the floors were washed, the bathroom scoured, the laundry done. It was, as always, a most satisfying project, Project End Christmas On Boxing Day.

And once again I will remind everyone that there are two types of Christmas Elves in the world, of which I belong to the latter category: 12 Days of Christmas Elves, and Advent Elves. We Advent Elves start Christmas festivities early. We are the ones who finish shopping in November, dig out our Christmas CDs the second Halloween decorations are put away, and fight the desire to tear down the tree at 10:00 am on December 25. 12 Days of Christmas Elves are the ones who keep their trees up into the New Year, who wrap gifts on December 24, and who think Advent Elves are insane. It’s okay! We think you’re kind of crazy too. We can still be friends!

As an important side note: the 12 days of Christmas START on Christmas. They do not start 12 days prior to Christmas.

In any case, around the Boyhouse things are pretty quiet this week. It’s terribly cold, so we are in hibernation mode: the kids playing with their new things, I’m enjoying my new books and clean house, and Barkley is just happy to have things back to normal.

172

No grievances, so I guess it’s time for feats of strength.

Posted on by

Since the last day of classes, I have collapsed into a puddle of sloth and gluttony. HOO BOY, the last week of school was a long week.

No matter how prepared a person may be, there are always some strange requests in the last week of school. On Wednesday, Mark told me that he needed to bring “food to share” to the class party on Friday. Fortunately yesterday I made and frosted 84 cookies, so I could spare a few for that, but then he also told me he needed to wear hockey gear for his class contribution to the Canadian Version of the 12 Days of Christmas. What? We have no hockey gear. His class had the line “FIVE STANLEY CUPS” and for that reason, he needed to wear hockey gear. For the school-wide 25 minutes of caroling. After much digging I found a Canucks ball cap that he had received some years ago as a gift, and he was grudgingly satisfied with it.

Jake’s class, by the way, had the line “Seven Sled Dogs Sledding” and HE needed to bring a stuffed dog to class, which also proved to be problematic, not because we don’t have a plethora of stuffed dogs, but because he couldn’t find one that he wouldn’t be sad about in the unlikely event of it getting lost or stolen. Finally I found one at the back of a whole pile of stuffed animals – we have way too many, really – and put it in his backpack, amid exclamations of excitement over the long-lost dog.

But now we are on vacation, and I’m telling you, I am the laziest person around. Other than going out for the last pre-Christmas grocery shop yesterday morning, I’ve been doing almost nothing except watch movies and read, while wearing yoga pants or pajamas. And eating and drinking, of course. All the boozy coffee for me, please!

This past weekend we headed up north to the lake, which was frozen solid, but in bumpy waves due to high winds. The kids got a huge kick out of walking on the lake.

sylvan

sylvan2

Did you know that Clarence Carter, of “Stroking” fame has a Christmas song? BACK DOOR SANTA. The title alone should probably say everything you need to know about it. Since it’s Festivus today, we should probably all start airing our grievances with a song that details how “Santa” sneaks around to have sex with all the married ladies in the neighbourhood, unbeknownst to their long-suffering and/or negligent husbands. Personally, I think Dick in a Box is a more appropriate Christmas song, because at least it celebrates monogamy, albeit through putting one’s junk in a box and having one’s lady friend open said box.

But the reality is that I don’t have many grievances to air, Festivus or not. I do hope that you all have a wonderful holiday filled with love and laughter. xoxo

How To Enjoy The Holidays Without Losing Your Mind

Posted on by

Is it me or is everyone insane right now? I’m not talking about all the sad things that are going on in the world – I will not talk about them, actually – but I’m talking about regular, everyday people who are so loaded down with forced jollity that they are ready to snap. If you have even one child in even one activity, you know that of which I speak. Why does the week before Christmas have to be packed full with six months’ worth of holiday festivals/ dinners/ parties/ concerts? I’ll tell you why; if even one activity decided NOT to have a festive December celebration, there would be complaints a-plenty.

Again, I know of what I speak. Our school does not have a Christmas concert – for the very good reason that we have a solid 25% Muslim population and another solid percentage of children who do not celebrate Christmas. Hey, that’s cool by me. Personally I would rather NOT have to book off an evening to see my children unenthusiastically playing the recorder, especially if it is at the cost of other children feeling badly about their cultural heritage. And yet, for all the years (FOUR) that I’ve been School Council/ Parent Association chair, I have heard complaints about this lack of a concert. People. There is enough to do. Don’t complain.

So this is why every dance school, sports club, extracurricular activity has a festive party, and this is why December becomes a gong show of show me your holly jolly. Even my kids’ karate dojo hosts a Candy Cane Shiah, which is fine, but if the kids had more than just the one activity I’d probably feel put-upon.

shiah

I seem to under, rather than over-schedule.

I get it. I totally do. But the thing is, I’m not feeling the stress. Here’s why: I have one thing planned this week, and it’s getting my hair coloured. I have secrets, people, secrets for alleviating holiday stress, that only kind of rely on wine consumption.

Nicole’s Secrets For Alleviating Holiday Stress

Say “Fuck It All”

Well, maybe not ALL. But fuck a lot of the stuff that you supposedly HAVE to do in December. Make a list of all the concerts, dinners, lunches, parties, and other festivities that you have committed to. Then cross off every single thing that isn’t an absolute necessity. You aren’t going to be able to cross off your child’s dance recital. You aren’t going to be able to cross off the Holiday Recorder Performance. Pretty much unless you are watching your child onstage, you don’t need to go. Potlucks, parties, etc., all those things are not necessary. Sure, if you want to, and you have the energy and a plateful of cookies you want to share, then go for it. But really, your friends will understand if you can’t make three parties in one evening. If you feel really bad about it, throw your own cocktail party in January or February, when nothing else is going on.

Let It Go, Let It GOOOOOOO

We all have things that are important to us around the holidays. For example, I have a friend who makes magazine-photo-worthy gingerbread houses (HI SUE) and another friend whose beautiful cookies could be featured in Oprah’s Favourite Things or maybe Martha Stewart Living (HI LIV) and that is fabulous. But if I tried to do that, I would end up in the bathroom with a bottle of wine, singing Santa Baby and crying. So I let the kids go to town on the gingerbread, with the following result:

 029 050 062 068028

It’s cool. I don’t mind gingerbread men with the word “BUTT” on them, or gingerbread men that have been decapitated and are missing limbs, all in the name of artistic expression. I don’t mind that the kids decided that it would be fun to have gingerbread men glued to the roof of the gingerbread house, with the illusion that said gingerbread men are sliding to their death. It’s okay by me.

The rule is, if it’s not super-important to you, don’t stress. Don’t even do it. If you feel exhausted even thinking about holiday baking, go to your nearest bakery and buy some cookies. PROBLEM SOLVED. But…

If It IS Important, OWN IT

It’s okay to want those perfect cookies; if it’s within your reach, do it! Enjoy every minute! For me, the Thing That Is Very Very Important is our annual Christmas card. It takes me a long time to choose the perfect photos, and to arrange them just so, and to get the wording right. Then I make my list and write out the cards, with little handwritten notes, and it is, to me, a Very Big Deal.

Now, here comes the rule for this one: What is Very Important to you may not be At All Important to someone else. This is also okay. This is freeing, in fact. You see, before I recognized this rule, I would have Hurt Feelings when I spent time sending off my carefully-thought-out cards and the sendee did not reciprocate. But realizing that getting a traditionally-mailed Christmas card is No Big Deal to some people is important. It means that I no longer send my card to those people. It might not be the Christmas spirit, but if I send a card, I want one back. If a person isn’t interested in the Christmas card exchange as an actual exchange, then I won’t send one.

There are some exceptions, of course. Certain family members will always get a card, so will friends that are ill or are otherwise unable to reciprocate. But other than that, I want to send my cards only to people who also value sending and receiving cards, rather than e-cards or a frantic email sent on Christmas Eve detailing why they haven’t sent cards again this year. It’s okay, non-card-sending people. We can say Merry Christmas another way. We can still be the best of friends, even if we don’t exchange cards! In fact, we will probably be BETTER friends, because I won’t have Hurt Feelings about it.

Delegate The Things You Hate

For me, the thing I hate is wrapping gifts. I am terrible at it. I have friends (HI REBECCA AND LYNDSEY) who love wrapping; they love their sparkly paper and ribbons, they love making plain boxes beautiful. Me? I’m always cutting the paper too short or too long, so I either have a paperless gap on a box, or a giant bunched up wad at the ends. The ribbon never curls and I need too much tape. Then my hair starts to fall out and I somehow get long red hairs randomly stuck on the Scotch tape. If I had my choice I would just stuff everything in gift bags but SOMEONE (read: my husband) insists on having rip-open-kind-of-gifts.

So guess who gets to wrap gifts in our house! My husband is very handy with the wrapping paper, but of course, I can only delegate so much. He can’t wrap his own gifts, after all, which brings me to…

Chip Away At It

My old boss, when we had a large trading position he wanted to get rid of, would say “Let’s just chip away at it.” When I have something I do not look forward to doing – gift wrapping, for example – I chip away at it. Ten or fifteen minutes a day of concentrated effort over a few days usually does the trick. That way I don’t sit, overwhelmed, staring blankly at a pile of gifts and rolls of paper.

Speaking of chipping away at things, here’s a great trick to make holiday baking super easy: make gingerbread or sugar cookie dough in October or November, and freeze it. Then take it out sometime in December, roll it out and cut into shapes, and voila! Easy peasy. Get your kids to decorate them with butt-related décor and everyone will be happy.

Shop Early, Shop Often

It’s too late to implement this now, but bookmark this for next year: start your shopping early. Swistle (HI SWISTLE) gave me the idea of buying gift cards one at a time, starting in September. It’s a great way to spread out the cost of Christmas, too. I also save my credit card “points” that swap for gift cards and use those for teacher’s gifts. This year I also bought a huge box of Lindor chocolates at Costco in October, and divided them amongst the non-main teachers for the kids – music teachers, etc. – and then I put them in brown paper bags that the boys’ wrote on, folded over the top, punched a hole in the top, and tied shut with a ribbon. Easy and somehow whimsical.

Look at it this way, the earlier you can finish your shopping – including online shopping – the more time you have to NOT be stressed out about gifts. Unless, of course, you are one of those people who actually like the mall in December. If you are, I salute you. You are stronger than I.

Hannah (HI HANNAH) mentioned this great idea: when grocery shopping in the months prior to Christmas, stick a few extra canned goods in your cart each time you go, so you are prepared for those holiday food bank drives. I know my kids tend to remember the night before they need to bring in canned goods, leaving me to dig through my cupboards and wonder if coconut milk is an acceptable donation, and where are all my chickpeas? It’s easier if you have extra beans or tomatoes that you can draw on.

Remember This Isn’t A Test

Unless you are actually having a magazine photo shoot at your house, there is no need to have the picture-perfect tree, lights, wrapped gifts, and food. Unless you have someone coming to your house and eating off your floors, your floors do not have to be clean enough to eat off of. There is no exam, this is not a pass or fail venture. So if you don’t make it to the mall to meet Santa, if you forget to move your shelf elf, if you have to leave Oreos instead of home baked cookies out for Santa, IT IS OKAY. Give yourself some love, pour yourself some Bailey’s, and remember – your family will appreciate a happy, relaxed mother more than a harried one that spent three hours that she didn’t have making sparkly reindeer food. You’re doing fine.

Riding the Roller Coaster of Emotion

Posted on by

So there I was, just going about my day like any other; I was driving back home from dropping the kids off at school, and guess what I found in my back alley:

manny4

manny3

Manny! What have they done to you?

For those of you who haven’t been following the Mannequin Saga of 2014, when we first saw Manny I thought he was a dead body hidden amongst the tree branches in the green space across the alley, directly behind my house.

deadguy

 

Soon after that, Manny was raised, Lazarus-like, from the dead.

creepymannequin creepymannequin2

And now, Manny is in pieces, with only an errant shoe and an empty Corona case to show for his travels.

manny1

Here’s the thing, though. Prior to this week, all of Manny’s activities have taken place directly behind my house. When I found our poor desecrated Manny, he was half a block down the alley. SOMEONE must have taken him, walked him down the alley, and then fed him Corona until he was numb before sawing him in two, like some magician’s assistant in a magic trick gone wrong. My suspicions lie with the people who live in the house behind which I found him.

It is worth noting that Manny has a few extra wounds to his torso than when we first found him.

manny2

But he is still one-armed. One arm is better than no arms, am I right?

Now here’s the thing: I cheerfully drove down the alley yesterday, on my way to pick up the boys and also to catch a glimpse of my favourite mannequin. I had the idea that maybe, just maybe, I would put a toque on him, in the spirit of the person who decorated the trees at the dog park. Just my little contribution to happiness in the neighbourhood.

But Manny was gone.

At first I thought maybe he’d been picked up with the garbage, but then I remembered that garbage day was Tuesday, so that couldn’t be it. It was terribly windy yesterday morning but I didn’t see him anywhere, and anyway he was pretty packed down in the snow and ice.

Baby, come back. You can blame it all on me. I was wrong, and I just can’t live without you.

 

Five Happy Things

Posted on by

1) It has been unseasonably warm for the past week; the air feels soft, almost spring-like. I’ve been able to let the boys play in the snow after school until the sun goes down (i.e., 4:30) and I’m not even painfully frozen by the time we leave the playground.

2) While my friends and I were walking our dogs yesterday morning, we came across this and two other trees just like it:

tree

I keep picturing someone with an excess of ornaments heading over to the offleash, and it makes me smile. Frankly, it’s inspiring. I have tons of extra ornaments, perhaps I’ll start decorating the trees in the green space behind our house. Maybe the mannequin will come back, wearing a Santa hat.

3) I’m currently reading The Girl Who Saved The King of Sweden and it’s delightful.

4) We went to see Big Hero 6 on Sunday and I found it very enjoyable, even if 50% of our family disagrees with me. I would love my very own Baymax to snuggle with.

baymax copy

5) I went to the Ladies’ Advent Luncheon with my mother, and one of the elderly ladies hugged me and said she remembered what an “exuberant young girl” I was, which I take as a compliment. Also, there were about four of us under age sixty and we all brought quinoa salads. Solidarity!

What’s making you happy today?

Clark, that there is an RV.

Posted on by

Today is not only a no-school day, but it is also a moon day, meaning that I have had a slow, lazy day with the kids, making truffles, roasting squash, and pulling teeth. In the interest of veracity, I should say “pulling one tooth”, rather than giving you the image that I’m spending my day with a pile of baby teeth. In any case, it’s been a great day, punctuated by the excitement I’m feeling over being nominated for the Canadian Weblog Awards in the categories of humour, life, and parenting. Not to be all, it’s an honour just being nominated, but it is, actually, an honour being nominated.

It’s a nice cap to what has been a very strange week. After last week’s bake sale, I swore that I wasn’t going to volunteer for anything for a while; after that decision I immediately signed up to provide a main dish for the teacher’s potluck dinner. What is wrong with me? In fact, I had three dishes to make for three separate potlucks in a 48 hour span, so I’m feeling a bit fatigued. I am attending the Ladies’ Advent Dinner with my mother at her church tomorrow, so I’m hoping the elderly ladies will enjoy my quinoa dish. Years ago someone brought hummus to the Ladies’ Advent Dinner and it caused a bit of a stir. I’m hoping a funky quinoa dish will show that I’m just as much a rebel as I used to be. It has quinoa and kale in it – and that is how you spell wild and crazy.

Other than cooking a lot of things, I’ve also spent a lot of time standing in lines this week. I went to Costco, on a Tuesday morning, and I was reminded why I hate going anywhere in the month of December. Costco is especially terrible, what with the hundreds of giant carts blocking the aisles and what seems to be a company policy against plowing the parking lot. I had to position my entire body at a 45 degree angle just to push the cart back to the car, and I felt like I had been actually run over by a stampede of giant carts by the time I got home. It was like when the kids were small and I had to walk two blocks to the grocery store with them in the back-to-front double stroller on snowy sidewalks. It was an epic workout, just going to the store for some crackers or milk.

After the exhausting Costco trip I headed to the post office for stamps. It’s December. People are mailing things. There was one employee working, and the lineup snaked around the post office. Twenty five minutes and a long, detailed conversation with the elderly woman in front of me about her grandchildren and the price of stamps later, I purchased my stamps and went home, where I was immediately faced with a “Missed Delivery” notice from Canada Post. I was instructed to pick up my parcel the following day at the post office that I had just left.

What can you do? The following day I headed for the post office, notice in hand. After standing in line for 20 minutes at the post office while the single person in front of me – an elderly man – had discussed every single option for sending a package to Manitoba, and asked about delivery estimates for what seemed like every possible location across the country, I decided to stop at the photo centre next door to the post office; I had received an email that the photo calendars I had ordered were shipped. I stood in line for another twenty minutes, only to be told that “shipped” did not mean “in store”. We’ll call you when it’s in, the lady at the counter said cheerfully, to which I very consciously smiled and answered as pleasantly as possible. I went home and one hour later received a phone call that my photo calendars were in.

So it’s been that kind of week. At least this is no longer parked in front of my house:

cousineddie

I looked out my window one morning and there it was. Clark, that there is an RV. I guess, technically, that a somewhat decrepit fifth wheel is not an RV.

When I was in university, I was taking a special statistics tutorial from a guy who, when he used “RV” for “Random Variable”, began discussing the actual recreational vehicle that one of our professors owned. It was the most simultaneously interesting and disturbing digression from statistics ever, since he talked about how he once peered into this professor’s RV (the recreational vehicle, not, obviously, the random variable) to see what was housed inside. I do not remember the result of this RV peeping Tom, but all these years later I remember wondering a) how the tutor knew where the RV was, and b) why he would want to see what was inside. Now, though, I understand his compulsion to look past the little frilled curtains, because I wanted to see if the mannequin was inside. I did not look, however, because the only thing weirder than me looking inside the strange fifth wheel in front of my house would be to find something like the mannequin. OR WORSE. In any case, the mystery of the RV’s appearance and disappearance – in the middle of winter, no less – will remain unsolved, just like the mystery of the mannequin.