• What to watch while you wrap presents

    Quirky Rom-Coms to Watch While Wrapping Presents.

    07/12/2016 - By 

    Hello friends. I know, a lot of lists lately!  If you are as busy as I am this holiday season, I hope you are enjoying the quick reads. Today I wanted to share my movie picks for wrapping presents. (While your kids are IN BED. None of these are child-friendly, FYI). If you have already watched all of your favourite holiday-themed movies (It’s a Wonderful Life!) and binge-watched all of your fave television shows (I just finished Gilmore Girls), then here are some (perhaps unconventional) feel-good movies that put me in the Christmas spirit while I wrap presents every year,…

  • A Gratitude Practice My Daughter Will Actually Do

    28/11/2016 - By 

    The idea of acknowledging and extending your gratitude is everywhere. Suddenly it is a buzz-worthy trend. I see articles about starting a gratitude journal or jar everywhere. I’ve tried to keep up a gratitude journal so many times but I’ve only made it happen two days in a row and a gratitude jar is neat but once I had a few papers in there, I never added to them, and I never looked at them. I know it is a good idea to focus your mind on the positive rather than the negative, but I hardly find time to work…

  • When Schedules Change

    21/11/2016 - By 

    Hello friends. How are you this Monday? Over here, we are still adjusting to the new schedule. I don’t know if I mentioned it, but my husband just got a new job (yay!!), and he started last week. It turned our whole schedule upside down. Our weekend was super busy so it was harder to jump back into the new (ish) routine that we had started last week. Especially for the kids. Every time someone asks me about Josh’s new schedule I say, “Oh, it’s good. An adjustment” and Izzy shouts, “Terrible! We never see him anymore!!” We were spoiled…

  • Remembering Leonard Cohen

    16/11/2016 - By 

    When I was younger, a toddler even, my parents (especially my mom) would play Leonard Cohen on the stereo while she cleaned during the week. We often played his music on Sundays- our day to play loud music and read or bake. Music was our religion since my mom is agnostic and my dad is atheist (or was). I grew up listening to Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, Tom Petty, Iggy Pop, David Bowie….and more obscure and eclectic artists. There was also a lot of heavier rock and folk music mixed in. Leonard Cohen was one of the folk artists that…

  • Super Easy Tomato Sauce

    11/11/2016 - By 

    The other night I was super rushed for time. I worked late and it seemed that supper time snuck up on me. We had activities to rush to after supper (#momlife, right?), so as soon as I got the kids from school it was time to start supper. If you work and do ANYTHING ELSE in life, you’ve had these nights too. We had a speaker come talk to our school council meeting and she said, ‘You’re busy. I’m busy. We are all too busy all of the time so there is no need to talk about that anymore. We make…

  • Making Time for Myself

    04/11/2016 - By 

    The title of this blog post is a bit of a misdirection. It is more of a public promise to myself to do just that. Currently, I rarely make time for myself. My husband calls me a “slave driver to myself”. When I did the Discovery Dyet this year (more on that later- in a word, fantastic) I found that I am an Analytical/Driver personality. It means a lot of things, but one thing that applies here is that I am a self-motivated person that can very easily focus on work and ignore the rest of life. I will put working…

  • When We Open Presents

    02/11/2016 - By 

    Hunter had 3 birthdays to go to this month. It made me think of a switch in how we do things at ours, that I thought we would share, in case you wanted to try it, too. Birthday parties have changed a lot since the ’80’s. When I was little, you went to birthday parties and they were always the same. You would show up at their house in a nice dress or good pants and greet the birthday girl or boy. Then, everyone would play some games like pin the tail on the donkey or guess how many sweets…

  • Isabella the Future Hockey Star

    27/10/2016 - By 

    My daughter, Isabella, is her own person. She needs things to switch up a lot, is naturally fidgety and is very vocal and competitive. She doesn’t put up with any long-term B.S. – in fact, we have been called a couple times to the school when things have gotten physical between her and someone teasing her (almost always a boy). I recently bought a pair of pants for Hunter that were a bit too big for him, so Isabella wears them now and they are her fave pants because they have the most pockets for collecting rocks and specimens to…

  • Decluttering and Unexpected Emotions.

    25/10/2016 - By 

    When I begin my decluttering journey, it was more about the effort to find the things I need more quickly and not feeling as if I was drowning in “stuff”. How many times can one person trip over a laundry basket of “things to be sorted later” before they feel frustrated? (Answer: Once past ‘too many times’). Even the amount and assortment of clothing I had was starting to annoy me. (You can read about that here). I took a test in a magazine that pointed out I am a “sentimental clutterer”. I keep things because, once upon a time…

  • Carving Out Personal Space

    17/10/2016 - By 

    My kids love people. They are fiercely loyal to their friends and will do anything for them. Family is a huge priority for both of them. My kids spend a lot of their time planning time with family and friends or writing them letters and drawing them pictures. That said, they are both sort of introverts. I find that once they have spent some time out socializing, they both need alone time. Carving out a bit of personal space for my kids every day is essential to their well-being, which we discovered at a very early age and they are…