november, 2004

happy birthday dad! [as aly says "WOW granddad, you're as old as a GIANT"]

november 28

we've just had a great family day - breakfast at dennys, a movie, dinner out, then monopoly [oh - with a quick trip to a scrapbook store sale!].

we went to see the polar express 3D on imax which was fantastic; "spegtaglia" [spectacular] in fact, as toby would say. aly said it was a little bit scary but that it was really good and toby said it was good - especially the train. i'd never read the story, but it is lovely and i think it was the best 3D movie i've seen. [and all for the price of a regular movie since it was just on at the imax screen in our local movie theatre].

saturday was aly and toby's friend's birthday at the local bowling alley. it was the first time they had played with the ramp to post the balls down and it made all the difference - instead of bowling 3 times and getting whiney and bored, we finished the whole frame and toby cried because he wanted to keep going.

it's beginning to look a lot like christmas.. hooray :-)

november 22

it's cold. i'm starting my winter hibernation. i'd have had my bath and be in my pj's by 5.30 each evening if it wasn't for my pesky social life getting in the way.

i've been experimenting with playing board games with the kids. they have several annoying games for young children that are just really boring so one day, as i was walking past our huge stack of games in the garage, i stopped and figured out which ones they might be able to play some version of. it's been proving pretty successful and much more interesting than their games. first we played yatzee - for those who know it - we just played the top section and played each row in order [collect 1s first, then 2s on the next go etc.].

last night we played monopoly [it was tricky deciding which version of the 30 or so to play, but i opted for disney monopoly in the end]. we didn't build houses and finished the game once all the property was bought which was plenty long enough. we counted out the number of properties everyone had and the winner was the person with the most. toby won hands down. he had so much money it kept cascading onto the floor. he loves counting and money so it was right up his street. he also managed to keep track of all his property and once pointed out to me that someone had landed on my dumbo! we already play snakes and ladders, bingo and junior monopoly, but thinkblot and triominos are next on my list of grown up games for us all to play together.

i'm still undecided about my new haircut. it looks like this for those who missed last month's update. i'm even more undecided after aly's comment the other day - "mommy, your hair looks like grammy's hair when she's asleep" - now i have nothing against my mum's hair, but bed hair? - and this was on a day when i'd actually put some effort into doing my hair!.

the christmas shopping is going well. it's mostly under control now. we're just left with juggling what to take to england with us and how to do that with presents for one another. i have a very hard time leaving shopping until the week before christmas so i'll have to smuggle sascha's over somehow. the really good news is that my permanent permanent resident card arrived on friday so i'll be able to get back into the country when i arrive in january :-)

november 14

well, it's been a busy week again. the good news is that the children are still playing nicely - in fact right now they're playing playdoh snake hospital together - as they have been for at least half an hour. [i'm just not sure how these snakes sustain such gruesome injuries and in fact, many of the injuries appear to be fatal].

toby is, as always, obsessed with numbers. they were spending their pocket money in walmart the other day so i pointed out the prices to show them that they could choose something starting with a 1 or a 2. anyway, this has opened up a whole new world to toby making it very difficult to walk through a store without him stopping to shout out every prices.

in the past few weeks, i've done a comparison of digital print prices/quality etc. although we have a sony photo printer (a dye-sublimation system), the cost per photo is relatively high, and printing the photos individually can be quite time consuming. so while i'm still going to use the photo printers for some photos, when i have more than 10 to print, i'm opting to use a service. anyway, since i figured my findings might be useful to other canadians, i've put them up in the north america section under digital print comparison [by the way, i gather nothing can beat boots in the uk at 10p a print].

november 6

i've added lots of halloween photos to the gallery for your viewing pleasure.

breaking news... today, for the very first time, i managed to do some scrapbooking while the children were at school. i was very very happy. i'm now up to june of this year with only 200 or so photos to go! i've been filling in lots of journaling gaps and other missing bits and pieces so i might start to scan some pages to add to the website. or maybe i should wait in case someone decides to get me a 12x12 scanner for christmas [hahahahaha].

while they're at preschool on monday it's back to root canal [part 2 of 3] for me. oh well, it was great while it lasted.

i don't wish to speak too soon, but aly and toby seemed to have called a [temporary??] truce. very little fighting for over a week now. maybe it's the additional reinforcement of fighting being a bad thing from their teachers, maybe it's the 'no tolerance' for any violence rule recently introduced in our house, or maybe it's just that their will to battle has been dampened by our continuing coughs and colds. who cares?! whatever the reason, i'm going to fully appreciate it since it would appear i used to take the peace for granted.

i now cherish every second that they spend happily in their rooms together playing families [in which case toby is either an extremely irritating whiney dog or daddy who takes his basketball to 'ea tower' and spends the day playing basketball and soccer with 'that other mommy' [the only other person he's ever met who works in that department!]], cooking giant surprise birthday cakes for me out of lego or pillow fighting.

november 1

well that was an action packed 4-day-long halloween. thursday was playgroup [where i took some really really bad photos with my aps camera which went a little insane when it saw the reflective safety sticker on toby's pirate costume! - so i won't embarrass myself by putting those photos up].

friday was my permanent residence interview with immigration in vancouver - i'm now officially a permanent resident, but won't get my card for another 4-6 weeks. it was also the children's preschool halloween party which i therefore missed.

saturday, sascha surprised us with tickets to 'the great big boo' - a show in vancouver. the kids loved it - especially when they got to meet spongebob, spiderman, dora and blue [from blue's clues] after than show. aly's favourite bit was meeting spongebob and toby's favourite part was getting candy!

sunday [halloween] was the big party at ea, trick or treating back home and then fireworks in the local park

toby the pirate at ea

aly - scared because it looks like the magician is about to slice someone's head off!

toby did a very surprising thing this week - after my exasperation at his drawings [scribbles] not having really changed since he was 18 months old [although he likes to draw numbers and letters]. i gave them some pieces of cardboard to draw on. came back into the room 5 minutes later and toby had drawn our entire family and written his name underneath [which he's never done without prompting]. kids! - you just never know what's going on in their brains.

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