A continuance of the shorter and more concise entries.....
October is here, and with that comes the end of another summer. It's a sad feeling, because it has been a good one - even with the kids often being a pain in the arse, the good has far outweighed the bad. So it's sad to think that warm sunny afternoons are now 4 to 6 months away again. We will have a good winter though - there is lots to do here, and we are planning a family holiday to Mexico again in February to get away and out of the bone-chilling temperatures for a week or so at least.
It also brings snowflakes - lots of them. But even in that aspect of life, we are making life easier for ourselves this year, with a new addition to the family - This new addition is a lovely medium-sized snowblower. It should help with the backaches that come from clearing snow by hand. It was on special offer in early September and I did not feel daft buying a snowblower on what was a 30-degree+ summer evening!
One of Ollie's favourite songs is also called Snowflakes and there is just something that makes me joyous but also really, really sad when I hear the song. This is it...
I think there are several factors in play here that just tug at my heart strings..
One is that the kid's singing voice reminds me so much of how Ollie has spoken for the last year or so - a real cute little kids voice - so cute you just want to pick up the kids, swing them round and give them a huge big hug.
Ollie loves this little song right now, but I know that soon he will grow out of it, and I don't want that to happen. Because my little boy will turn into a big boy, and that big boy might not want hugs and snuggles. He won't hug onto my leg when he stands beside me anymore. He won't want to just giggle and laugh as he runs round and round on the trampoline. Not only that, but he will stop the silly, 'Mummy, daddy It's morning time' shout from his bed every morning when the little sun appears on the clock.
It's not just Ollie either - Hannah, who also loves the song, will no longer laugh her head off at silly things like 'Sail Goat', in her chickadee magazine. She would almost pee herself laughing when we chat about a house cat being 'The size of a house'. She won't want to stand on my feet as I walk, so she can be a robot, and she won't want to piggyback down the stairs anymore.
The infamous Sail Goat
In short, this song reminds me of just how special our kids are right now. Every single new morning that comes around, I am already missing them as they were yesterday. They have been my best pals for the past 4 and 6 years and soon, they will go out and find their own best pals. Buffy and I will just become parents to older kids, like every other parent has done in the past. I hope we can still be 'friends'.
Its sad though. In fact its heart-wrenching - I absolutely love our kids so so so much as they are - even with all the shouting and screaming and other shit that surrounds every day. There are no words to describe how it feels when they run and hug me, or when I sneak in to their room every night to move Ollie back onto his bed properly, tuck Hannah into her blankets and kiss them both goodnight as they sleep.
I know they have to grow up, its just what happens, but I just wish we could all slow down a little and that things would stay as they are for a while longer.
The last few weeks have been pretty up and down - I had an illness that kept me off work for a day and in bed for 2 or 3 days. Buffy was absolutely great - taking the kids out for the day on a weekend so that I could get some rest. I really needed it too, but it still took me a week to get over it. The Dr said it was probably a bout of flu. Getting older is shit. Every time I get ill it seems to last longer than the time.
The kids were also great though, being quiet and not asking me to do too much with them. Luckily, it looks like I didnt pass it onto anyone else, although Ollie does have a snotty nose at the moment, he doesnt appear to be ill.
We did enjoy the last few nice days of summer - getting out to the park a few times, doing science experiments in the garden - including the bottle rocket, and we had a couple of late nights out downtown ate Nuit Blanche - the nighttime festival of lights and weird music and stuff - it has all been good and the kids have (mostly) been great too.
One of the best things about having kids is being able to do stupid thing and act like a kid all over again. Currently, if I drop off Hannah at school half of her class shouts at me that I pooped my pants because of one small silly joke Hannah made a week or two ago - I play along and pretend I have pooped and Hannah and all her classmates laugh and make jokes. I really don't mind being the butt of jokes if it helps the kids make friends and have fun. I even told them of when I wore a diaper because I ate Mexican food on holiday!
Another thing we do a lot of is have fun and laugh with the kids. Sometimes, obviously the kids are just dicks,, but It happens pretty often that Hannah or Ollie are laughing so much that they literally run to the bathroom before they pee themselves. Hannah's 'Sail Goat' joke is one example of that. Another was when I discovered a website where you can make a subject in a photo 'dance' - just input a photo, make it into a shape with arms and legs and then click go!
I first did this with Hannah and Ollie , with drawings and then photos of Hannah and Ollie themselves before moving on to soft toys, a photo of the toilet and a poop picture. These are a few of the results... You can just imagine the kids almost wetting themselves as they watched the toilet and poop dance!!
This weekend is Thanksgiving here in Canada and a lot of people get quite 'open' with the thanks they like to be thankful for. That's fine, I don't mind, it's quite a Canadian thing to do. There is a more English way to think about things, though.... I call it the 'Thank Fuck'.
It's kind of thanksgiving in reverse - Instead of being thankful for the good shit, you be mindful that the bad shit didnt happen.
So....
'Thank Fuck my kids were happily asleep by 9pm tonight'
'Thank fuck I remembered to buy booze at the liquor mart this evening'
'Thank fuck Hannah has not had a big breakdown in over a week'
'Thank fuck I got on that bus in New Zealand 14 and a half years ago'
'Thank fuck the garage door didn't fall off'
and finally
'Thank fuck I am sitting in a warm house, with a smile on my face, while my crazy kids sleep upstairs dreaming about a huge rocket taking off and landing early tomorrow morning while my wonderful wife and 3rd best friend (Me and the kid are just too childish together) is out with her buddies having a nice social evening. Its all pretty fucking good.
It's getting increasingly harder and harder to keep this blog up to date.
In the beginning, sitting on a bus for endless hours and hours as I travelled across the globe, it was easy. Even later when it was just me travelling, there was always time EVERY DAY, to sit down and write for half an hour. It was fun, tiring and emotional, but I always had time. Now though, other things are fun, tiring and emotional and those things are now 4 and 6 years old. They are not doing it on purpose, but they are far more important and much more fun, tiring and emotional than sitting down to write this.
I will continue to do the blog, though, but I will endeavour to keep it a little shorter and easier on myself. That way I will hopefully be able to put my full range of powers into two little bell ends who dominate the ongoing life of Buffy and me.
September this year has been and continues to be great but full of stuff and memories. It's 10 years ago today since Mum died and it's my 54th birthday tomorrow. Ollie turned 4 2 weeks ago and both kids are now in school - Hannah in grade 1 and Ollie in Nursery. The world is turning at such a pace that my head spins with what we do every week and what is coming up the next. As mentioned above, it is all fun, tiring and emotional, but we plod on.
We plod on as the kids scream at us and call us mean.
We plod on as they dance and sing in a 'show' but refuse to let us take videos (We sneak the odd one in)
We plod on as they snuggle us in bed and then scream as we leave
We plod on as they eat everything we put in front of them and still say they are hungry.
We plod on as they ask 10 billion questions without ever listening to the 10 billion answers we give.
They are emotional wrecks, as are we - But they are, in my opinion, the most important and greatest living things ever to have existed. They are the absolute best.
At the same time as loving them endlessly, I want to pull out their brains through their little ears and replace it with a working pile of mush that makes sense. Kids are just messed up and crazy and it's no wonder that they need 10 hours of sleep a night, because as a fully grown adult, just watching these little tornadoes makes me tired.
But there are small, significant changes afoot. - For example, Hannah asked about water and steam a week ago, and we ended up waffling about molecules and heat. A few days later she came out with a proper example of molecules about 'the floor is lava'. It was like listening to a TV scientist, and we were not amazed, because she can be brilliant in between the emotional flip-flopping.
Ollie now knows the words to some classic rock and pop music and will often dance and sing with more rhythm in his little arms and legs, than I have ever had. It would not surprise me to see him on stage in 20 years as a professional dancer, - he is that good. But then he drops his pants and pretends to poop on a Lego house. Its what a 4-year old prodigy is supposed to do to remind you not to take life too seriously.
This past few weeks has been full on - We took a Holiday to try and find something like I had as a kid. We wanted somewhere where the kids could play and meet other kids. So we searched and found a place called Rubber Ducky Resort - Just an hour north of the city. It reminded me so much of family holidays when I was a kid. A little resort with entertainment, swimming pools, arcade games, ice cream, somewhere to eat and actual things to. I love camping with the kids but after a day in the wilderness they get bored - and then they get crazy! So this was wonderful.
We spent a lovely 4 days and nights, swimming and playing in the pools, and visiting the little farm with goats, horses and chickens. We danced at the kids glow stick party and watched an amazing golf cart glow parade in the dark. The kids stayed up late to watch the stars and we drew patterns with flashlights and glow sticks Then they slept in the next morning. It gave me such nostalgia for my own childhood, I can't describe how nice it felt. It was our first real holiday in Manitoba where we diddidn'tnt have to try to find something for the kids to do. There was so much fun, whether it was being followed round the whole campsite by 3 baby ducks or riding the little train - 3 times a day - just because. We will be going back next year - the kids demand it!!
There is so much to tell I cacan'tnt do it justice.
We also did the exact opposite a couple of weeks later. We took the kids on an overnight canoe trip from the cabin and camped out in the wilderness.
It was only 1 night but they love love loved it! We set out in the afternoon from the cabin and canoed about an hour to a small rocky outcrop that is a well-known 'wilderness' campsite. We set up two tents and spend a lovely evening with the kids doing a little treasure hunt and eating a boil in the bag dinner before the sun started to fall. Then I got to sit on a log, with the kids and just watch the most wonderful sunset. It was delightful. After a nice bonfire we put the kids to bed and then enjoyed a beer or two the warm bug free evening. It was peaceful and calm and as it was the last part of a crazy August we went to bed tired but happy.
Back at home we added a saucer swing to the tree in thw garden - another thing to wear the kids out, and they have been playing hard on it. It was a bit of a faff as the first one we got had the bolts missing, so we had to order a replacement and wait a week, but once it was up the kids were so excited! When we had some kids round for Ollies birthday there were 5 kids riding it and it could have taken more! We can also use it as a kid of hammock for us adults when the kids are not about - a great investment!
You know what - I am going to leave it there for tonight. I hope you enjoyed the shorter read - there is so so so much more I could have written as it's been a crazy good and busy time.
I will add some more pics and maybe a video or two after this if you want to take a look.
There is Ollies 4th birthday jump shot on eth trampoline which is amazing!
We also took the kids out for a summer drink in a beer garden and to a show to see Al Simmons.
Ollie and Hannah had their first proper haircuts from a proper hairdresser
I also created a combined photo showing Ollie and Hannah both on their first Nursery day, two years apart in front of their school sign. I love that photo. Its all below!
If you don't want to know how baths work....miss out the first few paragraphs of this entry....
In my last blog post, I hinted about an improvement we are making tat I would be able to ' fit my whole body' into. Unfortunately, this was not a coffin - but a bathtub. The plan was to move a wall in our bathroom to fit in a longer tub, 66 inches instead of the standard 60. I do love a good soak in the bath and we thought that a longer one would give me a much nicer and wetter experience.
However, instead of paying out to do this Buffy was offered a chance to do some website work for a plumber in exchange for his services. It was not all as it seemed.
First, when Buffy quoted him on the website, he came around to take a look at the job and then came back with a ridiculous quote for the cost of replacing the bath and moving the wall - quite literally in the thousands of dollars. But as the services would be swapped he said he would still do the job in exchange for the website at not actual cost - so thousands of dollars saved!
We then ordered ourselves a new bath and looked at the possibilities of making it look really nice - we decided on tiles instead of a surround and found ourselves a tiler and tiles we liked as well as a nice niche for an in wall shelf! It was going to be great. All this extra stuff had cost us around $3500, but still to get this all done would be great. But then the shit sandwich started....
Just a couple of weeks before the job was due to start, we asked the plumber about the drywall he would be using - the tiler wanted to know whether he would need to apply a waterproof membrane or if the wall would use waterproof drywall. The plumber said 'what wall?'. Remember, this is after he had visited, told us moving the wall was easy and given us a high quote that included moving the wall.
We reminded him about all this and he then said we would have to supply all the materials for moving the wall AND then pay him around $1200 cash to do so. He also started to tell us that he was doing paid work for other clients and that we were now his lowest priority, so it might not get done for 'a few weeks'. Just what you want to hear. We have 2 kids - we can't go a few weeks without a bath! So now this was getting silly, a few hundred more dollars for the materials for the wall, plus over $1200 to do the work, that had already been quoted on previously. If he wasn't including the wall in the original quote, just what was the really high thousands of dollars quote actually for?
We had a good think and then Buff sent him the nicest 'fuck off' 🐧email you have ever seen. We decided not to do his website and not to do the bathroom. We also cancelled the bath, the tiler and all our plans. What we thought was going to be a great new bath, for around $3000 total, had turned into a clusterfuck costing almost twice as much, with no guarantee of the end date!
We also realized that length isn't the most important thing in a bath - It's actually soak depth and reclining angles! Some baths are really shallow, with the top drain under the taps being really low. Ours is actually 9.5 inches, which is the maximum soak depth and is crap. Our bath also goes straight up at the end, so when you try to lie back to get comfy it's like sitting in an actual coffin, minus the comfy red velvet lining!
Since the debacle with the longer (and much more expensive) bath, we have tested out a couple of short but more reclining baths with deeper soak depth and realized that they would work just great for us.
So we are probably now going to go with a better short bath, it means not having to move a wall and the short bath is less than half the price of a long one. Buffy knows another plumber too, who gave us a quick quote about a quarter of the cost of the lunatic who we told to get bent! We aren't going to do it soon, but it will get done sometime. Here's a super comparison photo, not drawn by me obviously, of what the old and new bath would look like side by side
A quick overview of less important but probably more interesting stuff..
Cabins...
We had friends over to the cabin a few weeks back and then we went out to their cabin for the weekend too. These friends are the parents of Hannah's best friend at school 'Bowie' and they live just a couple of streets away. It was really nice to get out to the cabin with someone new and shared a lovely weekend there. Its not often now that there is anyone else there apart from us and Buff's mum and dad, so it made for nice change. We also found out that another of Hannah's friends parents, go out to their family cabin just near Kenora, so we also went down there and the 3 families go together while the kids all played in the splash pad - a lovely afternoon followed by a huge family dinner in a local restaurant - we will definitely want to do this again.
Just this past weekend we accepted the invitation to go out to Bowies cabin, which is really remote and about 20 minutes by boat from the nearest town. Its a lovely cabin on a private island with a beach!
We had a another lovely weekend with a huge storm in the middle of the night. There were actually tornado warnings and although we didnt see any twisters, we woke up the next day to one of the chimneys on the ground and a few tree tops destroyed - so it did get pretty wild!
Anyway, we spent most of the daytime playing in the water and on the beach!
I was also lucky enough to sit and watch the sunset with Hannah..
We had a few days out in the past month too - the two best trips were to Tinkertown and to see monster trucks.
Tinkertown is an old-fashioned kids theme park just outside of Winnipeg. Its quaint and sweet and actually really nicely maintained - Kind of what Skegness was 30 or 40 years ago.
The kids loved all the rides and it was made even better when Pat and Austin, came along for the day too.
Hannah loved all the crazy big rides like the pirate ship and every spinning thing - while Ollie and Austin really really REALLY liked the little cars that you 'DRIVE' around a little track. It was so sweet watching him and Austin drive these little cars and really sad when Ollie burst into tears when we had to leave. Don't worry Ollie, we are going back for your birthday in a few weeks!
The monster trucks were at the MTS centre or whatever its called nowadays - the Hockey arena downtown. It was a crazy 2 1/2 hours of crushed cars and motorcycle jumps - the kids loved every minute. Except when they argued over chairs - But what the hell ''''MONSTER TRUCKS!'''
Another cool thing we found this month is a new park to play at. I saw it while driving out with the kids a while ago, and we went a few weeks back - It's a cool little park with a zip line for the kids, but it's right at the end of the airport runway, so the planes fly in over your heads. The kids love it, and we spent the morning playing while checking the real time flights app to catch planes coming in overhead!
We did have one weird thing happen a couple of weeks ago. We had some people scoping out our yard while we were out of town. It isn't that unusual to get the odd person wandering in and out of the yard, but this couple were dodgy and when they saw the security cameras they bloody well ripped them down. Then they walked off with them. They must have thought that by taking the cameras they would have any evidence! Idiots.
Luckily, they dumped them close enough that one of them was still connected to my wifi. So when I got home I scoped out the back lanes and bins and found the two missing cameras under a bush! I have remounted them now - and I have moved the kid's picnic table that was used to climb up to gran te cameras.
My new camera views are great and the police have two new suspects to look for! Bloody wankers!
Well, thats me nearly back up to date. The last tow things I want to mention are water related - swimming and first , a new game called Trampoline splashpad.
So Hannah and Ollie had watched a Bluey episode with a trampoline in it- you don't need to watch the whole thing, but the first 30 seconds of this video, will give you a good idea of what our two kids did...
Yep, they got the hosepipe and trampoline together to invent 'Trampoline Splashpad'. This game consists of me or Buffy spraying up over the trampoline or under and through it, while the kids get wet! It was perfect for last week when the weather was atrociously hot and the kids loved it!
The last thing is swimming - We put the kids in for a 1 week intensive swimming lesson package - every morning for 5 days, doing 45 minutes a day instead of half an hour a week for 10 weeks. Hannah has struggled in previous lessons to get her head in the water and jump in, and for Ollie it was his first swimming lessons.
Well, they both did amazing - Ollie cried on his first day but after a few minutes he recovered well and after 3 days was beaming ear to ear and loving it - he was so proud of himself and left the pool saying 'I had so much fun today' every day!
Hannah actually had a friend from daycare who helped her stay relaxed and on the 4th day she jumped into the pool from the side! She then did it again and again - which made her so proud of herself and meant we had to give them both some treats! They did brilliantly and we intend to do more of the intensive lessons in the future.
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