Down Under

On November 5, 2008January 23, 2009 By LynnIn TurtleHead5 Comments

A few years ago, Captain Jelly Belly and Gal Smiley were really into this children’s show called Hi-5. It features five ethnically-diverse, fresh-faced young Americans, singing and dancing and performing little skits. We watched this show every day, usually more than once. We had the CD. We had their Christmas CD, too. We played them both every day, all year long.

And I admit it, I was just as much of a fan-girl as the kids. Oh yes, I had a favourite Hi-5 member. I knew all the words AND the actions to every song. I blogged about the outfits the girls wore a little too often for a grown woman (summary: season 1, cute; season 2, shield your eyes). I often found myself humming the Hi-5 tunes around the house. Or at the grocery store. Or during girls’ poker night.

Little Miss Sunshine has never been much into television, but I’ve been showing her Hi-5 for a couple of months now, hoping to hook her. It probably seems like bad parenting to try to get your kid to watch more TV, but the Little Miss is at a very busy age and sometimes it would be nice to make dinner without someone hanging off my leg, or you know, spend three or four minutes with the other kids.

And you know, it worked! Suddenly, about four weeks ago, she noticed that Hi-5 was cool. It was interesting. It was groovy. I made dinner in freedom.

And then, about three weeks ago, TLC stopped showing it. BARBARIANS! They moved it over to their Discovery Kids channel in the States, but for some reason, the Canadian version of DiscKids didn’t pick it up. And now we are having a Hi-5 CRISIS.

TV Ontario used to show Hi-5 too, but at the same time that TLC dumped it, TVO stopped showing it too. Now TVO shows something else in its place…Australian Hi-5.

Hi-5 was originally an Australian show, but for some reason TLC felt that it wasn’t appropriate for American audiences as-is (maybe they feared a whole generation of American children growing up with unusually long vowel sounds?). So they re-filmed every single episode, word for word, with an American cast.

The first time we saw the original Australian cast on TVO, my older two kids had some minor distress. Who are those people pretending to be Hi-5? Where are the real Hi-5? Why do they talk funny? Who is that guy? Who is that girl?

They did NOT like it. And I agreed. I don’t like change. And I missed my favourites.

But I’m warming to it…because Little Miss Sunshine loves them. We watch it every day now. And it is interesting seeing that the Australian version is literally, no different than the American one — why they bothered to refilm it, I do not know.

Plus, there were only two seasons of the American version — meaning, I saw every single episode like, 100 times each — but there are a whopping ten seasons of the Australian version, meaning I could be looking at new content every day for a year, at least. Which seems kind of nice.

And that Nathan — he’s a real find. He has the snap, I tell you. In fact, I propose a Hi-5 dream team of Nathan and Kelli from Australia, Karla and Curtis from America, and…well, take your pick between Sun and Kimee. Actually, I’ll go with Sun. Whoo hoo, dream team!

So I just learned that the entire first season of the American version is coming out on DVD on December 2nd, and Little Miss Sunshine is getting that set for Christmas this year. By then she’ll probably be telling me to throw another shrimp on the barby, and wondering who the heck these Hi-5 impostors are with the odd American accents. G’day!

First Choice

On November 4, 2008 By LynnIn TurtleHead5 Comments

I’m beginning to question the value in a $40 haircut.

I used to pay at least that, plus tip, to have my hair cut. I am by no means a frugal person, but I do have trouble spending money on myself. Forking over the $40 for a haircut that I always, always hated until it grew in a few weeks later, plus the added bonus/horror of being attacked by a hot, loud, annoying hair dryer for half an hour, was always very, very painful.

Luckily I only get my hair cut about once every 8 months or so, so it wasn’t a very big annual expense, know what I mean? I get the haircut, I hate it for three weeks, I love it for six weeks, then I wear my hair in a ponytail for six months until I talk myself into giving up the $40 again.

My real problem with haircutters who charge $40 is that they only will do what I ask them to do. I have had the same haircut for twenty years. I am not a hair visionary. What I want, for my money, is creativity. I want someone like Nick on What Not To Wear (I realize he charges slightly more than $40) to look at my face, understand my lifestyle (no! more! hair! drying! ever!), put that together with today’s trends and styles, and create for me a look.

Hairstylists from my past haven’t done that. They all just sit me in the chair and ask me what I want. What I want, I guess, is to look like Katie Holmes at a movie premiere. What I will ask for, on the other hand, is “just take two or three inches off the back, layered all over, no bangs.” Same old, same old…that’ll be $40 please!

I understand that they probably do not often get someone in the chair who will give them carte blanche with their hair. Usually, I’m sure, they get people who have a very specific idea of what they want their hair to look like, and if it doesn’t look exactly like that at the end, they get pissed off and yell at their stylist and make said stylist feel really, really crappy.

But I am not that person. You have an idea of what would look good on me? ANY idea? I’ll take it!

Sadly it seems, $40 can’t buy you an idea. It can only buy you a servant.

So the other day, I was talking to MyFriendJen and she had a cute new haircut, so I asked her where she had it done. I’m currently in the market for a stylist because it’s been more than 8 months, so I’m entering Wild Woman Of The Amazon territory, and my old stylist is currently recovering from having both his legs broken in a car accident in Lebanon (and of course, it’s ALL ABOUT ME).

Anyway, so MyFriendJen told me she just had it done at First Choice. She said, “I got tired of paying $40 to have the same cut over and over. The First Choice people aren’t creative geniuses but they can give me a serviceable cut when I tell them what to do, and it costs like, $14.”

$14!!!! For basically the same service — I instruct, they cut. It’s genius!

So I think I’m sold. I could never bring myself to pay more than $100 for a cut, which is what I think it would take to have someone who would actually design a new look for me. So I may as well just pay $14, instead of $40. Hell, at that price I might endeavour to have my hair cut every six months.

But let’s not get too crazy, now.

Out Of Sorts

On November 3, 2008 By LynnIn TurtleHead4 Comments

Is it just me, or was yesterday like, a hundred years long?

Making the switch from Daylight Savings Time back to Eastern Standard Time is always a hard one for us. The kids get up at their usual time, which is usually 6:30 am, but now is 5:30 am, and that gives us a whole extra hour to fill in the day. You might think, heck, it’s only one hour, I could kill that just paging through the satellite guide looking for something good on TV. But when you have three little kids to entertain, an hour is an excruciatingly long, long time.

I was doing fairly well up until about dinnertime, and then I totally crashed. I just had nothing left. Sir Monkeypants managed to hold it together enough to get the kids in their jammies and watching a show on TV before we both flopped out on the couch, exhausted. I swear I thought bedtime would never come — every minute felt like an eon.

By the time we finally did get the kids into bed — a little earlier than usual, around 7pm — we were both just wiped out. We were sitting on the couch watching Sunday Night Football and I said to Sir Monkeypants, “I’m just going to get a glass of milk and then go to bed, I don’t care if it’s early.” And he said, “It’s 7:15.” And that was too early even for me, so I decided I’d try to make it until at least 8pm.

I never did have that glass of milk, though. By 7:30 I was asleep on the couch.

By 8, Sir Monkeypants had joined me.

He finally roused himself around 9:15 and we both stumbled up to bed. Seriously, this could be the most pathetic thing that has ever happened to me.

In other pathetic news, know what I saw in the house this morning? A MOSQUITO. It was biting me on my left hand, and now I have a dime-sized lump there that is itchy as all hell. Plus, the beast is still loose in the house somewhere.

What is the point of living in a country where we have SNOW on the ground for Halloween, but we still have freakin’ mosquitoes? I may as well move to Borneo, for christ’s sake!

Year Of The Fender Bender

On November 2, 2008 By LynnIn TurtleHead3 Comments

So! Sir Monkeypants and I had a wee little car accident last night. It’s kind of becoming a theme for this year, don’t you think?

This time around, Sir Monkeypants was driving and the whole thing was SO totally NOT our fault. We’re both still kind of angry about it but I’m trying to soothe my pain with Halloween candy. Progress is being made but I definitely need more sugar.

I should mention that the kids were all safe at home in bed. We’d been to a dinner party and one of the twin girls from up the street were babysitting for us. We love them, the kids love them — this is the second time we’ve hired the twin sitters (there’s SO a tween novel series in there) and we are loving our newfound social freedom.

Anyway, so we’re on our way home at around 11pm and we come to the last 4-way stop before our house. There were already two cars at the stop — Car X at the front, and Car Y sitting behind it. As we approached we could tell that the two cars were not moving on, and there were a few guys milling about on the road. So Sir Monkeypants slowed down and approached very cautiously, because we did not know what was going on.

Just as we came to a stop about a car length behind Car Y…Car Y’s little white “reverse” lights came on. I’m not sure about Sir Monkeypants but I figured that Car X must be broken down, and Car Y just needed to back up a few feet to get around.

But instead, Car Y suddenly floored it and began to reverse at full speed.

Sir Monkeypants was totally awesome, he lay on the horn at full volume and tried to get our car into reverse too. But it all happened just too quickly and Car Y slammed into the front of us.

I was pretty shocked and angry and I started to jump out of the car while yelling expletives. Sir Monkeypants was also mad but has a much calmer head on his shoulders, so he ordered me to get back in the car immediately and not to engage in Angry Confrontations With Persons Unknown. He takes pretty good care of me, I must say.

So I sat my ass back down and Sir Monkeypants got out making his Angry Dad face. The young men who had been standing in the intersection turned out to be from Car X, and they all immediately hopped back in their car and took off, leaving the driver of Car Y to face down a mad Sir Monkeypants.

Car Y’s driver turned out to be a very small baby. Seriously. He turned 18 just a week ago. He’s had his non-graduated license — the one that allows you to drive at night without a fully licensed driver in the passenger seat — for just over a month. He was driving his mom’s car and had his girlfriend riding next to him.

When he saw Sir Monkeypants and his Angry Dad face, I thought Kid Y might pee his pants.

Sir Monkeypants had Kid Y move his car into the strip mall parking lot next to the intersection, so we could let traffic pass, and then he tried to get the kid’s information. Naturally Kid Y could not find the car’s insurance information or ownership papers, so we just took down his license plate and his license information and got his home address and phone number.

Man, I do not envy that kid the conversation he was going to have with his parents when he got home.

So as the boys were exchanging info — Sir Monkeypants was still steaming mad — guess who shows up? Car X and the four well-built 20-something young men who were inside.

They wanted to have a little chat with Kid Y.

From their conversation we figured out that Kid Y had been chasing after them (they do not know each other), driving too close, revving the engine, and generally acting like a dick. So the 20-somethings got out of their car at the intersection in question to tell Kid Y to knock it off, and he freaked out (as well he should, IDIOT), and threw his car into reverse to try to get away, slamming into us in the process.

So while I do kind of feel bad for the kid — he was like a scared little bunny rabbit — he really was acting very, very stupid behind the wheel of a car. And a good scare of this kind, along with a year or so of being grounded, will hopefully teach him a good lesson.

This morning my neck hurts like an SOB and it’s definitely due to the accident — hopefully it’s just a temporary thing. Our car seems okay, just a scratched bumper and a badly bent license plate, but we’ll have it checked out just to make sure.

In the meantime, Sir Monkeypants is really looking forward to placing a call to Kid Y’s parents later today.

Kids these days, Jesus! I need more sugar.

Halloween Debriefing

On November 1, 2008 By LynnIn TurtleHead1 Comment

Last night’s trick-or-treating was, I think, a complete success. The kids had fun, and weren’t too cold or too worn out after their hour outside. They brought home a nice haul of candy but not to the point of gluttony, and with a surprisingly small percentage that Captain Jelly Belly can’t eat. So all good!

Is it me, though, or is trick-or-treating just not the same as it was when we were kids? I remember the first kids ringing my mom’s bell at 5:30 (and her cursing about it, declaring it much too early) and older kids still coming around as late as 9 (again, with much cursing by my mother). When I was young we’d be out working the streets with our dad for at least a couple of hours; meanwhile, at home, my mom would hand out candy to upwards of 250 kids, sometimes resorting to apples from the fruit cellar or raisins from the cupboard to replenish her inventory.

This year, our kids went out at around 6:15, and they were one of the first out on the street. When I put Little Miss Sunshine to bed at around 6:40, we still hadn’t heard a single ding-dong at the door. In the end I would guess we saw maybe 40 or 50 kids at our house at the most, and the last kids to come by rang the bell at 7:35.

That leaves us with a LOT of leftover candy. Not that I’m complaining. My thighs might be complaining, though, in a few days, from straining to fit into my jeans.

It’s All About The Sugar

On October 31, 2008January 23, 2009 By LynnIn TurtleHead5 Comments

Happy Halloween!

I’ve been baking.

Yesterday I made two dozen of these for Captain Jelly Belly’s Halloween party:

Pumpkin cookies

They look really impressive, but actually they kind of taste like slightly sugary air. No flavour whatsoever. Plus they were a pain in the ass to make — the dough was very finicky and supervising the cutting out of shapes almost gave me a coronary. So I’m not sure how often I’ll be making these again. I hear they were a big hit at the party, though.

For Gal Smiley’s party, I made two dozen of these:

Pumpkin cupcakes

That’s a pumpkin-shaped marshmallow on top of the cupcakes. The marshmallows are simultaneously disgusting and highly addictive. Plus, despite their small size, they contain about 100 teaspoons of sugar. Probably the closest thing to child crack I’ve ever found. The ones I sent to school also had orange and black sprinkles on them, but I didn’t put any on these ones because they bother the Captain. Needless to say we didn’t get any leftovers sent home after the party.

I actually made these same cupcakes (but half chocolate, and all with sprinkles) for the little kids on our street last week. Captain Jelly Belly and Gal Smiley helped make them and decorate them, then we put one cupcake each in these little Halloween take-out containers I found at Michaels:

Trick Or Treat Box

Then we went for a little walk along the street and left the boxes with whatever neighbouring kids we knew. It was very fun and everyone was very excited to get them and I think a new tradition has been born. Maybe we will do it again on Valentine’s Day, too.

This afternoon we’ll be doing some last minute pumpkin carving, then we’ll be getting ready for trick-or-treating. The Captain will be going as Darth Vader. Gal Smiley will be a white kitty cat (as she has been every day for the past three weeks).

Little Miss Sunshine will be going to bed early.

The Captain has been feeling a little iffy about trick-or-treating this year since his allergies mean that he can’t eat at least half of the candy he rakes in. We offered to let him swap anything he gets that he can’t eat for something we have here, since all the candy we’ll be giving out is safe for him.

This morning Sir Monkeypants suggested I go out and buy a few more bags of candy, just so that we have lots of selection here for the Captain to choose from, to make him feel better about the swapping and feel like he got a bunch of different stuff. So after my Mommy And Baby swim class with Little Miss Sunshine, I went over to the WalMart to get some extra candy.

I was there a few weeks ago buying our stuff and they had SO much candy, aisles and aisles of it, with a whole extra section containing a million boxes of chips piled from floor to ceiling. A lot of their stuff was safe for the Captain because it was all extremely cheap crap, made up of sugar, artificial flavours and colours, and glue — ideal for him because when there’s no natural ingredients, there’s a low chance of allergens.

I seem to remember in years past picking up cheap Halloween candy in the week after Halloween, and the WalMart had such an eye-boggling amount of candy just two weeks ago, I figured I’d have tons to choose from still. But to my shock, when I got there, all the Halloween candy had been replaced with Christmas decorations!

I found the remnants of their candy in a back corner — there was just two small shelves full left. No more massive piles of chips. No more boxes upon boxes of candy. Just a couple bags left of the really crappy stuff.

And, there were like, 10 people there fighting over it! I had to elbow my way in, with the Little Miss, and grab what I could. It was crazy — I thought for a second there it was Boxing Day, and I’d accidentally walked into a 75% off everything sale at The Gap. Sheesh.

Anyway, I got a couple of bags of different (crap) stuff for the Captain to choose from, so we should be well and sugared up by 8pm tonight. I’ll probably be hung over for day one of NaBloPoMo tomorrow. See you then!

Field Trip

On October 30, 2008January 23, 2009 By LynnIn TurtleHead4 Comments

On Tuesday I went through yet another parental rite of passage — I went on a field trip.

It was Gal Smiley’s JK class. They went to Saunder’s Farm, a local farm that specializes in Halloween activities (you can read an excellent review of it on DaniGirl’s blog). Sir Monkeypants went with Captain Jelly Belly last year, so this year I got to have a turn.

I thought I’d get to blog about all the fun and wonder and moving mother-daughter moments. My own mother came along for exactly one field trip with me, when I was in kindergarten. We went to the apple orchard, and I had a little red apple-shaped name tag and my mom had a big green apple-shaped name tag. The fact that I can still remember details of that trip — possibly my earliest accessible memories — tells you what a big deal it is when a kid’s mom comes along for the trip. I remember being SO excited that my mom was there, being so proud to introduce her to all my friends.

And not that my trip with Gal Smiley wasn’t fun, but JESUS, it was COLD. Barely above freezing, with a wicked, strong, bitter wind whipping around our heads. On top of that, it was pouring rain.

Definitely the kind of weather that makes me think, “Boy, I’d love to go to a farm right now and do outdoor activities for an hour and a half!”

Here’s what I was wearing:

jeans with double-layered splash pants over top
extremely thick, heavy wool hiking socks
winter boots
a shirt and a fleece
my winter coat
gloves
world’s dorkiest toque with ear flaps

And I was cold. And wet. Very COLD AND WET. Some parents were just wearing fall jackets, with running shoes. Most didn’t have hats and some didn’t even have gloves. I felt very, very bad for those parents but they were getting my dork-hat over my dead body.

So it wasn’t really the magical time I had envisioned. I don’t have any cute anecdotes to relate. I don’t even have any pictures — I was too afraid of the camera getting soaked and also, I was definitely not in any kind of mood to be removing my gloves. I think Gal Smiley had a nice time and she was happy I was there and everything, but most of the time she was too focused on survival to notice the activities or my presence. She does like the little baby pumpkin she got to take home, though.

The only really interesting thing that happened was that one of the other moms there had a baby carrier hiding inside the front of her jacket, and inside the baby carrier was a four-week old baby. We were all pretty amazed that she was brave enough and healthy enough and alert enough to even be vertical with the baby, let alone at a farm during a hurricane. So I came home and told Sir Monkeypants about this amazing Amazon woman, and the first thing he said was, “Was it Shelly?”

Oh, you mean the wife of your good friend from work? Who just had a baby four weeks ago, and who has a daughter in JK at Gal Smiley’s school? The one I’ve been hearing stories about for years and the one who I have actually met on a few occasions? That Shelly?

Hm. Now that you mention it, yes.

Sometimes I am socially stupid. I guess I could always claim that my brain was frozen.

I’ll Get Right On That

On October 28, 2008January 23, 2009 By LynnIn TurtleHead4 Comments

As he’s getting off the school bus yesterday:

Captain Jelly Belly: Mommy, we need to find all the grown up men and ladies in the world and get them to make more babies.

Me: Um….okay. Why, exactly?

Captain Jelly Belly: So people don’t become extinct.

Me: Well, there are lots and lots of people in the world, so that is probably never going to happen. But if it makes you feel better, I will call all the grown ups I know and tell them to make more babies, okay?

Captain: Okay.

Me: But NOT DADDY AND ME. We have already contributed!

NaBloPoMo Revisited

On October 27, 2008 By LynnIn TurtleHead6 Comments

Last year during NaBloPoMo, a lot of the bloggers who had been doing very well were busted during American Thanksgiving. They were travelling and couldn’t get internet access during transit, or their parents’ place didn’t have a computer, or it was just too busy to find time to dash off a few lines.

I’m not proud to say that I was pretty smug about the fact that Canadian Thanksgiving comes in October. We’d already made our big family trip and now I was free to sit at home, in comfort, using my own pretty little computer to blog every day. (I wouldn’t find it out of line if you wanted to slap me around, just a little bit. Smugness, begone!)

Now it’s payback time. We didn’t go down to Southern Ontario to visit our families this past Thanksgiving because my mother and my sisters made the trek up here. That doesn’t happen very often, so we definitely wanted to encourage them to come on up and have a good time. And it really was a great time, plus, having Thanksgiving dinner here had the major bonus of giving me cold turkey sandwiches with stuffing for FIVE DAYS after the fact, which: BLISS.

But. Since my family came up, Sir Monkeypants’ family did not get their usual visit. And since we would like to spend Christmas at home, that means we have to make a quick weekend trip down in November to visit his side of the family.

So I have just realised that I’ll be away for five days in the middle of November with NO INTERNET. Yipes!

Think my in-laws will notice if I slip off to an internet cafe every day for an hour or so? No?

It’s time to strategize. I’m not giving up yet. Is it cheating to post-date your posts?

Sweet Treats

On October 26, 2008 By LynnIn TurtleHead6 Comments

I’m finding it very hard to shop for my father-in-law and brother-in-law this year for Christmas. We’ll be seeing them both in about two weeks for the last time before the holidays and I need some ideas pronto!

One of my ideas is to get them both a food gift, some sort of (relatively) exotic and special sweet treat. Does anyone know of a (sort of) unique and funky chocolate shop or bakery in the Ottawa area that sells cool treats, that you’d recommend?