Chris's space

Well the craziness of March is over and done for 2009.  Having 4 birthdays in the house and March break with 2 school age children makes for a very busy month.  Fortunately we all survived!  This year the children asked us if they could have separate birthday parties, and since this is really the first year where both children have thier own separate friends, we agreed.  It took us quite a while to figure out the logistics of hosting two kids birthday parties for children who have thier birthday on the same day.  Aidan wanted a space themed party, while Meredith wanted something girly.  Since money has been a bit tight lately we didn't want to have two huge parties one of the play places like Cosmic Adventures.  Personally I really don't like those type of parties anyway - I find them to be so impersonal and at around $200 each it just seemed too extravagent to pull off.

 

Well after a lot of back and forth we ended up having Aidan's party at a glow in the dark mini putt place.  He really enjoys mini putt and with the glow in the dark stuff it really gave a space sort of feel to his party.  Aidan and all of his friends seemed to really love his party.  I even managed with my friend Colleen's help to make an awesome globe and universe cake - which the kids were thrilled about.

For Meredith we decided to host a tea party at the house for the girls.  Turns out the girls party was absolutely amazing!  I found princess tea cups at Michaels that the girls could decorate with permanent markers for an activity and in essence thier loot bag/thank you gift.  I made little sandwiches for the girls which we cut out with heart, flower and star cookie cutters and served them cookies together with pink lemon tea (pink lemonade) and apple tea (apple juice).  I also made beautiful cupcakes served on a tower rather than a birthday cake.  After planning the whole thing Ed discovered a service here in Ottawa called princess parties, where they send a "princess" to your party and she entertains the children for an hour or so. So we decided to hire Belle to join our party as a surprise to the kids.  She did some majic tricks, sang, read stories and made balloon animals for the kids.  You know I could not have imagined a party going off so well.  The kids absolutely loved it.  I'd highly recommend this for any little girly girl!

By having one of the parties at the house we were able to cut costs a bit, but with one of the parties being off site we also managed to reduce some of the work involved.  So this really ended up being the best of both worlds if you have to host 2 parties on the same weekend.  But I have to say I was absolutely exhausted by the time the weekend was over and I'm glad that we don't have more than one birthday a year.  Note to future moms out there - do not have your children's birthdays too close together!!! And the month of March is lousy for parties, since you can't have them outside, it really limits what you can do.

 

Needless to say my birthday came and went without much fanfare, although my girlfriends Tanya, Jen and Stace made it special by joining me for a pedicure and lunch.  Thanks you guys are the best!!!

The past few months have been a blur, but a few things have stood out as being noteworthy.  The first was the Christmas holidays.  This was our first Christmas up at the cottage.  There was a few logistical issues to work through with having the celebration up there.  One of the major ones was getting the gifts and wrapping supplies up without the children seeing.  It meant an extra trip one morning in the middle of a snow storm and me in tears at having gotten stuck in our driveway backing up and nearly having our SUV slide down the hill into our neighbours cottage.  Dropping in for morning tea would take on a whole new meaning after that one -eh?  Fortunately, I got some help from Jack, one of our neighbours up there who usually clears our driveway (he just hadn't gotten around to it that morning yet when I decided to try and plough my way through it).  And thankfully my sister Ashley helped me on the weekend before Christmas to wrap everything - since Ed wasn't any help this year with Christmas preparations.  Yeah I know I sound a bit bitter - I am! Ed didn't even bother to get me a stocking stuffer - I even had to take care of that this year (now that is a sad statement).  Oh well, I'm getting used to it.  Good thing I like getting everything ready for the holidays.

 

Ed's parents and brother and his family, as well as my grandfather joined us as usual for Christmas.  Unfortunately a bout of the 24-48 hour stomach flu decided to descend upon the family over Christmas.  Fortunately the worst days of it for everyone missed Christmas day, so we were all able to eat at least some turkey.  It hit my grandfather and Ed the hardest - which makes sense given my grandfather's age and how bunt out Ed is with his insane work schedule. (secretly I don't believe that Ed has actually left Corel since he promised me that he would work less hours with this new job, so far that promise is in no way, shape or form being met, but that's a whole other story). 

 

The weather and snow on Christmas Eve was perfect for skating, tobogganing and snowman making, so Rich, Trish, Heather, the kids and myself spent a good deal of the day outside playing.  Isn't that how we should all spend Christmas Eve?  Much better than rushing around at the stores or wrapping up work don't you think?

 

On Christmas Eve the children are allowed to open one pre-designated gift, which is always their Christmas PJ's from papa.  This year Aidan knew exactly what the present was before he opened it.  I also let them open up their stockings as soon as they wake up, so that they have a little something to do before I get breakfast made.  However, I am somewhat of a cruel parent and make the children wait to open everything else until everyone is done breakfast.  I like the idea of drawing out the festivities as long as possible because once everything is opened it seems like there is nothing to left to look forward to.  The kids started out great about taking their time with the presents and not just flying through everything.  My sister in law, Trish was really funny about egging the kids on to tear through everything and getting them pumped up.  Needless to say her efforts were rewarded because about half way through opening things paper was flying and my list of who gave what was no where near complete or accurate. (sigh...honestly I really tried to do the whole thank you cards thing - I even had the kids write about half of them up…sorry and thank you to everyone who did give us gifts - we loved everything)

 

Anywho…what I really enjoyed about this year was the fact that no one went too crazy with the kids gifts, in fact a lot of what they got this year was clothing, which I really appreciate.  I also absolutely loved spending the holiday at the cottage and experiencing a rustic surrounding and nature all around, not to mention having our families with us.  It felt like what Christmas should be.  The effort of decorating 2 places was definitely worth it!

 

Ed, the kids and I also decided at the last minute to spend New Year's Eve up at the cottage.  Our plans of having a party with our friends up there just did not pan out - people hate the idea of travelling for an hour in the middle of the week.  Shame!  Oh well, my father, Lynn, Matthew (my brother who I haven't seen since Aidan was a baby) and his new girlfriend joined us for New Years.  It was just a casual evening.  Candace was pretty excited because her divorce was finalized on Jan. 1.  New Years day was quite cold out but the ice on the lake was perfect for skating, so the kids and Ed took advantage and spent some time skating around the lake. 

 

The following day we headed back to the city and Ed flew out to China, which marked the fist day of his month long travels.  He ended up spending the entire month on the road with work - we actually figured that he only spent 4 nights on January in his own bed.  However the last week of the month was somewhat of a break for him.  The kids, my grandfather and I joined Jim and Donna up at their timeshare in Orlando and Ed managed to meet us there.  He had a working vacation, which allowed us to spend some time with him in a much warmer climate than at home.  It was a great reprise for my grandfather too who has been finding the winters here to be very long lately.  The holiday was nice, although I must say travelling with two children and a mobility impaired senior is not the easiest way to travel - but I made it.  Ed and I even got one evening out by ourselves and went to see The Blue Man Group.  Seriously that was such a funny show!!! 

 

We also managed to take the kids to 3 theme parks - Universal Islands of Adventure, Disney's Hollywood Studios and of course the Magic Kingdom.  I think that the Universal Islands of Adventure park was the best - in particular Dr. Seuss Land, which was unlike anything I had seen before.  I've always been such a huge Dr. Seuss fan and I'm so glad that my children enjoy his books too.  I even got a chance to ride some insanely monstrous rollercoaster.  The kids surprised us by not being afraid on the Spiderman ride - which even scared me and Ed a bit in parts.  What made it particularly enjoyable was the fact that we had no more than 10 minutes of wait time for any attraction and that you did not feel like they were pushing the merchandise at you constantly at every turn.  That is the one thing I hate about Disney parks is how much they try and hawk their goods at you and the children.  It is a bit scary though that the parks were all quite quiet, the global economic slowdown is definitely visible in a place like Orlando that is a tourist area.

 

Other than that, we went up to the cottage for Valentine's Day weekend.  I made the kids heart shaped pizza, a special dessert and picked them each up a heart shaped balloon.  It's funny because I am actually not a fan of Valentine's Day - it has never made me sad if I didn't have a man in my life on the day and I've never felt it necessary to do anything special on it either.  I personally feel that it is a manufactured holiday by the stores to mark up flowers and candy.  That being said, I thought it was kind of a fun day to do stuff with the kids.  What was really cool about the weekend was the condition of the ice at the cottage - at least half of the lakes surface was skateable and there was a huge patch that was as smooth as glass.  I've never skated on such smooth ice in my life, even at a rink!  And what was even better is that we were the only people on it.  It really made me feel so special to have that opportunity to spend with Mother Nature.

 

Now that we are in March, most of my energy is directed at birthdays.  Since both children are born on the same day, I have two parties to plan for.  We also have March break coming up, my birthday as well as my grandfather's birthday.  I'm thinking that I will likely have a hard time keeping my weight in check with all of the cake right now.

As you can tell I haven't been super great about posting to my blog recently.  That is mostly because there hasn't been too many really exciting things happening in our neck of the woods lately.  As well, like everyone else I've been busy with the upcoming holiday season.  We've decided that we will be spending part of the holidays up at the cottage this year, so we've had to decorate not one, but two places.  We even opted for a real tree at both places.  I suspect that next year we will be seriously considering a fake one for the house, since Ed and I were so completely frustrated by the time we had selected and erected both trees.  The one at the house was a comedy of errors as the darn thing kept falling over.  I seriously think that tree was a little drunk.  Ed ended up having to cut the base of the tree off after putting so many holes in it that we had no choice but to start over.  We also wound up tying the tree to our mantle to keep it up!  Oh yes and Aidan still managed to topple it over twice even after it was tied in place.  Perhaps having a moving toy train on a Christmas tree is too much of a lure for a 6 year old boy?! 

 

The tree at the cottage wasn't much better, but for me the frustration was more having to do with finding it than with putting it up.  We thought we could find one on our way up to the cottage since Ed was adament that this year we would pick our own tree and cut it down, rather than getting one oh at say the grocery store.  Well we ended up doubling back by nearly half an hour in order to locate such a place.  Unfortunately all the trees at the tree farm were kind of puney and after an hour of tromping around the forest in the cold and snow, I gave up to warm up in the car.  Meredith took over the hunt with Ed and they ended up finding one.  I really don't do so well when I am cold and my feet are wet from snow.  Although I do have to admit that it was truley worth the aggrevation and couple of glasses of spirits once everything is done, since nothing beats a beatifully decorated real tree. 

 

I've been personally challenged this year with regards to my Christmas tree control issues.  I've had to relinquish most of my control over how the tree looks, since the children took over decorating it.  In fact, they even noticed when I tried to non-chalantly move a few items around after the fact.   My children believe that items of similar themes must be tightly grouped together in order to keep one another company.  This of course goes completely against my every instinct of nicely spacing things apart on the tree.  Fortunately for me, they got tired of decorating the tree once it was about half done so I was able to fill in the gaps with other decorations and ornaments in what I considered to be a reasonable arrangment.  I wonder if everyone is as possessive of thier Christmas tree as I am?  I'm sure this goes completely against the "spirit" of Christmas and all that.  I think I did an okay job of letting them have thier fun, without too much complaining or trying to take over, although I'm sure Ed would tell you somehting different.

 

We managed to take in a couple of shows leading up to the holidays.  Meredith and I went to see the Nutcracker at the NAC this year for the first time.  We both thoroughly enjoyed it and it will definately become a holiday tradition for the two of us.  I also snuck away and went to see the Top Three Canadian Idol show.  I wanted to go to see Theo Tams (this year's winner).  Loser girl that I am, I actually went by myself to the show, since Ed would have no part of it and none of my close friends watched it.  It was a really fun show to people watch at.  The demographics were nothing like I expected, most of the audience had grey hair, in fact the average age was probably about 50, with a smattering of young children with thier parents.  There were very little teens and twenty-somethings at the show, which was really surprising.  I even met an 88 year old lady who told me that this was her first ever concert - go figure!  I even ended up sticking around after the concert and got autographs from the three guys.  It was fun and I'm glad I got over the humiliation of going by myself.

 

 

 

At some point each of us comes face to face with our mortality, be it through the death of a loved one or acquaintance who is close in age to ourselves, or perhaps this wake up call comes as a result of a personal health scare.  Well Ed ended up facing his mortality last week through a rather bizarre occurrence.  Here's what happened:

 

Now as many of you know Ed has been working rather insane hours, in part because his company has been going through a rather sizable round of financing ($15million to be exact) - which I'm sure many of you can imagine is no small feet given today's global market conditions.  Well on the date that the press release went out (a day or so after everything had been finalized) Ed had a "date" to go out for celebratory drinks  with one of the lawyers who worked on the deal.  The evening before the Partner of said lawyer who also knows Ed and happens to be a board member for a local church contacted the lawyer and asked him if he had spoken with Ed recently.  Apparently he received a message from the Church stating that Ed Chaplin had passed away earlier that evening.  So the Lawyer showed up for drinks and was apparently quite relieved to see that our Ed did in fact show up and the financing deal was not in fact responsible for his untimely demise.

 

Two days later the article about BTI was published as was Ed's obituary.  Needless to say we were relieved that it wasn't our Ed and were able to have a good laugh about the whole thing, but I do pass on my condolences if the other Ed Chaplin's family are reading this and am sorry to hear of their loss. 

The second entry from my friend Cassia's blog about the fine women who refer to themselves as Tai Tai's (wives in Mandarin).  You can check out her bog at http://texpat-in-taiwan.blogspot.com.  Enjoy!

 

Tuesday, October 21, 2008