• Banff & Radium

    13/05/2015 - By 

    On my 35th birthday, my mother-in-law took the kids for the weekend and we got to get away. It was just a couple of nights but it felt longer. Both cities are so close they would also make suitable day trips if you live in Calgary, Alberta. We got to Banff on Friday, in late afternoon, and checked in to our hotel. High Country Inn is very cute and I would definitely stay there again in a heartbeat. Loved the (almost) overly woodsy lobby and the friendly hotel staff. The two at the front desk were, I believe, Australian. In…

  • Mother’s Day!

    11/05/2015 - By 

    Mother’s Day, as my husband let me know this morning, was invented by a lady to celebrate her mother, as she never had kids of her own, but she ended up resenting the holiday. How strange! She is, however, a genius. All mothers should be celebrated randomly with love all of the time, throughout the year, but it is nice when kids get a chance to make special cards and celebrate in very specific ways. Mother’s Day is also near my wedding anniversary! My husband and I got married on May 8, 2010 and so we hit the five year…

  • Thank you, Doctor Who.

    21/04/2015 - By 

    Here is a photo of me with my new Tardis necklace (blurry, too bad), sweaty from the hot day outside and hot C-Train ride home. I always said I wanted something from Doctor Who, but nothing too garish. This was perfect. I bought it, last minute, from Comic Con this time around. It didn’t cost very much but it makes me very happy. I bought the necklace on Sunday, just as Comic Con was shutting down. I wore it all Monday with a smile on my face, thinking that I should watch all of the Doctor Who episodes again. Especially…

  • Nightmares

    20/04/2015 - By 

      So Isabella is still having nightmares. I am going to have to figure out a way to make her room super zen and feng shui and just the right amount of light so that she can sleep soundly. Last night we had to lay beside her for her to settle. She is a super restless sleeper and fights REM sleep. We accidentally saw an animated video of a song about zombies at Comic Con this weekend. Izzy was sobbing because every time she closed her eyes she saw it and it scared her. I lay beside her and caressed…

  • The Terrible Twos are Back Again?

    07/04/2015 - By 

    I love my kids. I feel I need to say that before I post this next thing. If someone were to threaten either one of them I would lift up a car and throw it at them, no problem. I would be so enraged my superhero strength would surely kick in. That said, my kids are little adults in training that have their own opinions about everything and sometimes piss me off. When they are little you think, “This is just a stage. This will pass soon, and we will be (thankfully) on to the next stage and challenge.” You…

  • Learning To Read

    10/03/2015 - By 

      My daughter is learning to read and is busy reading EVERYTHING. Packages, sign posts, lost posters, books, brand names…she sees, she reads. Yesterday she asked me what the word ‘bounding’ meant. The snow leopard went bounding through the snow. She wanted to know how to do that too. It makes my brain work in new and wonderful ways to explain words that I know the meaning of and take for granted. I find myself reaching far in my brain to bring out words that she will understand. Sometimes defining one word leads me to defining five more words within…

  • A Family That Meditates Together, Stays Together.

    28/02/2015 - By 

    So I downloaded a guided meditation app and my kids LOVE it. One day the little munchkins were little hurricanes of emotion. Hyper, angry, hyper, sad, hyper, more hyper, giggling machines, leave-me-alone! machines, hyper. At bedtime they were all over the map and even stories didn’t calm them down. My wonderful friend Shanna gave us LED rope lights and I set them up just in time. I asked the kids to grab pillows to sit on and switched on those lights. We sat in semi-darkness and I queued up our guided meditation app, Stop, Breathe & Think, then turned it…

  • My Daughter in a Nutshell

    22/02/2015 - By 

    I realize I never updated on the story I started the other day about the Girl on Girl Emotional Warfare.   Everything is fine now and it turns out Izzy was the instigator. The moment I put too much pressure on her at home to keep her writing tidy, she took it out on a girl at school and called her work “scribbles”. *facepalm* Needless to say the girl was hurt and the hurt feelings went back and forth. Izzy apologized to the girl and they are friends again. All of this could have been avoided if I put less…

  • Some Truths About My Past

    28/01/2015 - By 

    Today is going to be a very self-indulgent post. I just have to get some facts straight and writing helps. I really thought about not posting this, but it is a part of me and I am generally just stating facts so there you go. Plus, I’m allowed to air my side of things. I have a voice and why should I silence it. I am not doing this to hurt people but to just say facts from what I’ve seen.   I grew up in small town Saskatchewan, in a town of around 3,500. Out of all of the…

  • To New Moms

    08/01/2015 - By 

    If I could write to all new moms I would say so many things. One of those things is that the biggest lie out there is it gets easier. You will just have to rise to new challenges. Some of these challenges will seem less, um, challenging than the last but it will never be easy. If it is easy then you have a kid who acts as if he is always on Prozac. Wait, that’s a new challenge right there. You will never feel like you have had enough sleep, you will never feel that you have enough time,…