Author Archives: Nicole Boyhouse

Wasn’t that a party?

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The party was great!  I had full intentions of posting pictures of my outfit, but we had a new sitter and in my anxious getting-ready-to-leave-and-talking-far-too-much (“and the cell number is here, and here, and here”) I forgot to take a picture before we left, and then when we got home I was feeling slightly worse for the wear.  There was great food, lots of wine, and the deejay even played Billie Jean, despite which I maintained my dignity by NOT doing the moonwalk.  In fact I didn’t dance at all, instead partaking in many entertaining conversations, not the least of which was with one woman who regaled me with her stories of visiting “The Happiest Place on Earth” and crying a lot.  I felt an immediate kinship with her.  I introduced myself to one sweet young girl who floored me by saying she recognized me from this blog.  That was both startling and gratifying, and if you are reading this, hi!  Thanks for reading!  Also highly gratifying was the conversation that took place with another lovely young girl in the ladies’ room, who informed me that she loved my hair and wished hers was like it.  Such a thing has never been said to me before, given that my hair is one of my least favourite attributes and the cause of much emotional suffering throughout my life.  In fact, I can summarise an entire decade of bad hair in two words: home perms.  I would do a photo montage of that time if it wasn’t so incredibly depressing.  So I was sufficiently warmed by the kindness of people, and I stayed up until all hours – i.e., midnight – resulting in my feeling quite tired and slightly delicate today.
In other words, I was not in the least prepared for the scenario in which I drove Jake to a birthday party, taking place at a church gymnasium, and realized when we arrived at the church, ten minutes late, that we were actually at the wrong church.  Situation was revolutionized by my actual utilization of my Garmin.  My husband bought me that Garmin two years ago in response to my constant getting lost and hysterical, but I have never independently operated it.  I did manage to use it today, and although I was a bit panicky (“Why is it saying to put in an address for British Columbia?  We’re not IN British Columbia.”) I did end up at the correct church.  However, once we were there and I was oriented, I realized that the Garmin had taken the most circuitous route possible.  Nonetheless, I did get there so Garmin for the win! 
While Jake was spending, apparently, two solid hours in a bouncy castle, I browsed through Bed, Bath and Beyond.  I had never been there before but I always kind of wanted to, all because of the scene in Old School where Frank the Tank describes his potential “pretty nice little Saturday”.  I ended up buying a new shower curtain, to replace our ten year old one, and felt like I just renovated our entire bathroom.  It’s funny how something small can do that.  It’s also funny how my husband’s and my own tastes are incredibly divergent on the subject of shower curtains.  I cannot wait for the conversation when I go to replace our aged comforter!  But that is a story for another day.

Warning: Very Frivolous Post

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It’s December!  The sun is shining!  The snow is slushy!  My husband’s office Christmas party is only tomorrow!
I know the socially acceptable norm is to hate the office Christmas party, especially the HUSBAND’S office Christmas party, but I…don’t.  Frankly, I love it.  I look forward to it every year.  I love dressing up, and eating food that I didn’t make, and drinking lots of wine…and I realize that those are things I could do NOT at a Christmas party, but I love the festivity of it all.  My love for office Christmas parties is so great that I am thinking of a new career: hiring myself out to attend Christmas parties for those women who do not want to go.  It will be like being a Christmas party escort, but in a totally non-skanky way.  In fact, I offered to wife swap for my friend Nan when she wrote about not wanting to go to her husband’s party.  (I think it may have weirded her out.  But Nan!  There’s going to be karaoke!  KARAOKE!  I only wish there was karaoke at my husband’s party.) 
It’s probably fortunate that there is not karaoke, given that my zest for singing far, far exceeds my actual talent.  Related: Mark’s recent report card was very good in every area except music.  “Mark is an enthusiastic student, but requires support when using his singing voice.” 
You know how there are people who are Shoe People, or Handbag People, those who have many of those items and enjoy shopping for them, who change their shoes and/or handbags to go with every outfit?  I am not one of those people.  (I am more of a Coat and Sweater Person).  So I was looking at my outfit for the party: the dress that I bought for last year’s party that I did not end up attending, boots dating from 1999, and my “handbag”.  My “handbag” is actually a well worn, large messenger bag from Roots that is constantly stuffed full with everything from travel Kleenex and hand sanitizer to gloves and five different lip products.  Currently there is also a book of stamps and several grocery lists jammed in there alongside a bracelet made out of pompoms and jingle bells that one of Mark’s little friends made for me.  In other words, it doesn’t really “go” with a party outfit.  Usually I borrow a handbag from my mother – who is not only a Handbag Person and a Shoe Person, but also just a Clothing Person in general.  Girl likes to shop. – but she is currently out of town.  (Note: she just chastised me for not just going over to her house and rummaging through her things until I found an appropriate bag.  Sorry Mom!  I try not to make it my business to just go through other people’s things.  Especially someone’s closet.  Don’t want to find something I don’t want to find if you know what I mean and I think you do.)
Anyway, I really needed to find a handbag, so I spoke to my very good friend who is, without a shadow of a doubt, a Handbag Person and she gave me tips on where to go to maximize my shopping experience.  I followed her directions, all the while breathing deep ujjayi breaths to alleviate my anxiety.  And look what I found!

Cute, right?  A little handbag, all my own!  Not only do I think it is cute, it was on half-price!  Did I mention I love my Handbag Friend?  And boots to replace the ones from 1999!  They are, I think, just the right mix of cute and slutty.  I’m all ready for the party! 

Grumpy Grandpa

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My grandpa passed away Friday night.  He was 96, and ill, and so it was not surprising or even, to me, particularly sad.  I was thankful that we had visited with him a few months ago, prior to his foray into the hospital and nursing home, while he was still at home and still able to discuss the oil business with my husband.
My grandpa was not the kind of grandpa to bounce me on his knee, or to play with me, or even to smile much.  He was, to be completely frank, a gruff and grumpy man.  He would sit at the head of the dinner table, in complete silence, not joining in the dinner table conversation or even acknowledging that other people were there.  His plate was always filled, not by him.  My grandma would sit beside him, only sometimes asking if he wanted more before filling his plate.  He was a teetotaller, but also extraordinarily health conscious, so when he read that red wine was good for the heart, he purchased a gigantic jug of cheap, sweet Kelowna Royal Red.  After dinner he would pour himself half a cup of that swill, directly into the glass that he had just drained of milk. 
Just thinking about that makes me smile.
He was essentially useless in the kitchen.  I very much doubt that he could have made himself a sandwich.  But once, many years ago, my younger brother and I were encamped in his living room, embarking on what was probably our fiftieth round of Rummikub, bored out of our trees on that Christmas holiday.  My mother had taken my grandma shopping, and yet we heard an immense amount of banging and rustling from the kitchen.  We exchanged looks and continued with our game.  After thirty minutes of that noise, my grandpa emerged, carrying a plastic bowl of tortilla chips.  “Here,” he said gruffly, “You kids like these.”
He rarely acknowledged that he liked anything, but if he did, he would say “That’s pretty good.”  When I received my master’s degree, he said that it was “real good”.  And once, once I was visiting them at Easter.  I was a teenager at the time, and I came to the breakfast table dressed in a skirt, ready for the church service.  “Well,” he said, “Well.  You’ll be the prettiest girl at church today.”  He never said anything like that in my hearing before or since.
He was divorced, with four children – the youngest was my father – in a time and place where that would have been considered somewhat unusual.  He married my grandma, who was a widow with six children.  I am one of thirty one grandchildren.  There are lots of great grandchildren and even some great-great grandchildren.  I lost count.  He liked having family around him, even though he didn’t show it in a particularly conventional way.
He was gruff and silent, and he had a huge family and a long life.  I will always smile when I think of my grumpy grandpa.

I WIN!

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I have been having a very stressful and emotional week, and that was even before it became apparent that my stressful and emotional week was exacerbated by the fact that it was coinciding with my monthly stressful and emotional week.  You can imagine the tears and chocolate eating that have been going on around here.  And this is where I make a public service announcement: if you decide to stock up on the new Peppermint Lindor with the intention of passing them out to people in a Santa-like and also join-my-cult-like way, and that stocking up coincides with an emotional and stressful week, you can be assured that you will not pass along any of those Peppermint Lindors but instead you will attempt to consume them all yourself until you resemble Santa in a physical, rather than a metaphorical way. 

That’s how my week was going, so you can imagine my excitement when Kimberly from Make Mommy Go Something Something gave me this:

It’s an award!!  I’ve never received a blog award before!  I feel IRRESISTABLE!  Thanks Kimberly!

It’s Friday, and I’m all T to the G.I.Friday.  I need some laughs, so I stole the idea of “Funny Friday” from my friend Allison over at Bibliomama.  Hey, Allison, you’re irresistable too!  I’m passing that award along to you.

I wish I had the kind of witty, dry, British humour that people tend to associate with intelligence and higher breeding, but unfortunately for me I am Scottish-Norweigan and my sense of humour tends to the low-brow or gutter variety.  Which is to say, this is one of my all-time favourite movie scenes.  That whole movie is filled with many enjoyable moments and lines, such as “We’re going streaking!  Bring your green hat, let’s go!” or “Denver!  The Sunshine State.”  Last weekend I watched You Don’t Mess With The Zohan and, while it wasn’t as funny as one might think a movie about an Israeli commando-turned-hairdresser might be, it did have some good visuals, such as the scene where he goes clubbing wearing cut-off shorts and a silky shirt.  I tried to find that picture but all I found was this:

photo from RottenTomatoes.com

If you have a dog, you may really appreciate this post on moving with two less-than-gifted dogs.  I really could identify with the dog who magically made his own food.  Good times. 

So, if you share my kind of humour, enjoy those links and have a good laugh this Friday! 

I just want to eat my COOKIE!

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How was your weekend?  It has been painfully cold around here – so cold that I gave the boys the warm fleece pajamas that I was saving for Christmas – and so I spent a large part of the weekend pleasantly bustling around the house, baking things and making batch after batch of cookie dough in preparation for holiday baking.
Speaking of cookies, have you seen this video of the CEO of Alberta Health Services, refusing to answer media questions on the grounds that he was too busy eating a cookie?  You can’t make this stuff up.  I think the funniest part is how shrill his voice is when he says “I am interested in eating my COOKIE.”  Good times.  I think I’m going to start responding like that whenever anyone asks me anything.  “I am STILL eating my COOKIE.”  Maybe I’ll shove the cookie in the questioner’s face, just for fun.  Actually, since most people who ask me for things are my children, they probably would appreciate that.  To a kid, eating cookies is serious business.
While I was baking things and running errands and discovering that Lindor now makes PEPPERMINT CHOCOLATES – Mother of God, it is the most amazing discovery since frozen After-Eights – my husband continued his painting rampage that has been going on for the past few months.  This weekend he started painting Mark’s room a deep blue, a nice change from the dull brown colour it has been since before we had kids and that room was an office.  Anyway, he took everything out of Mark’s closet, which is apparently a catch-all for all kinds of things that we forgot we had.  Like a 1980’s version of Trivial Pursuit.
And this is where I say I don’t know why I bought the children any toys for Christmas, because if you give them an extremely outdated version of Trivial Pursuit, they will be occupied for hours.  And no, I am not boasting about my precocious children and their intimate knowledge of Arts and Literature and Geography and how they somehow knew who Phyllis Diller was in the Entertainment category.  No.  I just mean that Jake opened up his very own bakery and made pies all day long.



He made pies like a samurai!  While using the Chutes and Ladders board.

 While Jake was busy force-feeding the rest of the family pie, Mark set up the actual game board and started a complex game using wooly mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers, and pirates.

If that wasn’t enough excitement for one day, they also found a giant foam finger from my days as a working girl, as opposed to my days as a household drudge/ bon-bon eating housewife.

This picture is absolutely hilarious to me.  Worth a thousand words, I tell you.

And for those of you in more moderate climes, here is a view out my back door:

It looks pretty, anyway.  Check out one of my gardens!

There are leaves still on the shrubs!  Poor things.

So tell me, how was your weekend?  And do cookies trump serious conversation?  Discuss.

I Don’t Have Bieber Fever

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This week saw the culmination of all my book fair coordination efforts.  I have been living and breathing the book fair.  My life has been consumed by the book fair.  I was even, unbelievably, dreaming about the book fair.  Now the book fair is over and I feel empty inside.
Actually I just feel exhausted.  I’m used to my life of leisure, and this week took a surprising amount of effort.  I would like to give a shout-out to working mothers everywhere, because this simple week of volunteer work left me exhausted and overwhelmed by such things as the laundry and making dinner. 
Nonetheless I very much enjoyed it, not the least because I feel like a minor celebrity, known around the school as “The Book Fair Lady”, as opposed to my previous title of “Mark/Jake’s Mom”.  When I walk down the hall I get students excitedly waving to me and bombarding me with questions about the availability or otherwise of the latest Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and if we have any of those UV Light Pens left.  Those crappy pens became the bane of my existence.  Kids kept coming back with defective pens and buyer’s remorse.  
Adding to my feeling of general fatigue is the fact that it is bitterly cold and snowing, and getting the boys to get their gigantic layers of snow pants, winter coats, hats, neck warmers, mittens and boots on in a semi-timely fashion and getting out the door several times a day is tiring.  My kids come home for their fifty-five minute lunch hour, and the scramble to get them home, fed, and back is seriously trying what is left of my sanity.  Given that Mark takes a solid ten minutes to actually get out of his classroom with his many, many layers on, by the time we get home and peel off the layers they have approximately ten minutes to eat before starting the whole process over again.  It’s enough to make me eye the bottle of wine on the counter longingly.  (NOTE: I only eye the bottle.  I am a very responsible, non-drinking-before-bedtime kind of mother.  Don’t want to give the wrong impression here.)
Speaking of trying my sanity, the book fair was stocked with piles of books about Justin Bieber, posters of Justin Bieber, and even stickers proclaiming “I have Bieber Fever” and “I am Justin Bieber’s Favourite Girl”.  Frankly, I don’t get the appeal.  When I was the age of the girls who were excitedly pawing through the various Bieber merchandise, my pretend boyfriend was this guy:
I can still rock out to his music.  Justin Bieber, on the other hand…
I don’t like to be negative, but seriously?  What is with his HAIR?  Hoo boy, I just realized that made me sound like my father.  It’s not enough that I’ve inherited his prematurely grey hair, now I’m critiquing tween pop culture?  Sigh.

Naughty? Or nice?

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Did you know it is 41 days until Christmas?  That’s less than six weeks!  Squee!
I am feeling extraordinarily festive today.  We put up the exterior decorations – and by “we” I mean “my husband” – and I have been bustling around figuring out how many family pictures to print for the Christmas cards and what pictures to put in the calendars we send the grandparents, and when to start baking things.  The latter feels a bit strange, since we still have overflowing bags of Halloween candy, but whatever.  Things are festive around here.
As an aside, I know there is a practice of parents purchasing Halloween candy from their children, presumably to keep them from eating sugary treats.  What then happens to the Halloween candy?  Do the parents consume it themselves?  Does it get donated somewhere?  Or thrown out?  And if it gets thrown out, why go Trick or Treating anyway? 
Does anyone still send out holiday cards?  I love addressing cards and adding pictures and a holiday newsletter; it is never a chore to me.  However, I was looking at last year’s holiday newsletter, and I realized that, other than the kids’ ages and grades, there is nothing new to put in this year’s letter.  Would it be funny to send out the exact same letter with the pertinent information crossed out and rewritten?  Probably not. 
Part of the reason I feel so festive is that, other than three small items which I can pick up this week, I have completed my Christmas shopping.  This is a huge deal to me.  I always try to finish by mid-November because the mere thought of going to the mall and being faced with people who are ready to THROW DOWN over a parking space and who may just kill someone over the last Zhu Zhu Pet and the mile-long of lineup of sobbing, hysterical children dressed to the nines just to sit on the creepy mall Santa’s lap gives me heart palpitations.  Nicole’s number one holiday hint: to keep the Christmas spirit, avoid the mall at all costs. 
And remember: there is room for everyone on the Nice List!